‘There are few nineteenth century artists as controversial or as profoundly shocking as Félicien Rops. Even more than a century after his death, his “blasphemous erotica” can still cause great offense in a world of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

‘Rops was born in Namur, Belgium in 1833, the son of a wealthy cotton dealer. He was home schooled by a private tutor before attending Jesuit college where he excelled at art. However, he hated the intense Catholic education and quit college at sixteen. He then went onto finish his education at Royal Athenaeum. His talent for art flourished and he achieved some early success as a caricaturist for the student magazine Le Crocodile and local magazines. But it was as a lithographer and etcher that he proved his technical brilliance and unparalleled artistic talent. He co-founded with Charles De Coste the satirical magazine L’Uylenspiegel (1856-1863). They mercilessly attacked Church and State, the bourgeoisie and artistic pretensions. The magazine made both men (in)famous—Rops was even challenged to a duel after one particular provocative attack.

‘He married, had two children (one dying in childhood), separated from his wife and moved to Paris in 1862. His arrival in the City of Lights changed Rops dramatically—he was like a wide-eyed yokel driven to excess by the thrill of the metropolis. He began to draw and paint with a fevered intensity the world he inhabited. He exhibited some of his work back in his hometown of Namur in 1865—in particular a portrait of a female absinthe drinker (La Buveuse d’Absinthe) which so outraged critics and civic figures that he was denounced by an official rebuke for prostituting his pencil in “the reproduction of scenes imprinted with a repellent realism.” The response pleased Rops—though he described it as akin to being spat upon—as it meant he had found his right subject matter: the dark and neglected and unacknowledged underworld of everyday life. This led Rops to co-found the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts—a group set up to promote “realism” in art in 1868.

‘Another key event was his meeting with the writer Baudelaire, whose work confirmed many of Rops’ personal beliefs. He illustrated Baudelaire’s banned volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal and became one of the resident artists of the Decadent Movement—though he also had a place in the Symbolist camp.

‘The Decadent Movement was a loose collection of artists and writers who came to prominence in the last two decades—or fin de siècle—of the 1800s. The term Decadent was originally intended to be disparaging—but Baudelaire and Rops considered it a suitable description of their lifestyle and work. The Decadents were in revolt against the constrictive and petite bourgeoise morality of the day. But even this doesn’t quite tell the complete truth. Though Rops had rejected much of his Catholic upbringing—he had some lingering religious beliefs. He was a Freemason—and some of his work was highly anti-Catholic. Take a look at his pornographic re-imagining of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa being “penetrated” by the lance of the seraphim. He had a fear of women but was for a time happily married and then lived in a menage a trois with two sisters. He was rational but was superstitiously obsessed with the occult—in particular the power of the Devil. He railed gainst the petite bourgeoisie and against fame but harbored a desire for success—on his own terms.

‘The novelist Péladan said of Rops in La Plume (1896):

Three hundred subtle minds admire and love him, and this approbation of thinkers is all that matters to this master; if a man of the middle classes, one of those for whom popular works are written and who actually read them, should happen to show a liking for one of his works, he would immediately destroy it. As a patrician of art, he wishes for no other judges than but his peers, and not out of pride. The best token of his modesty is the fact that he is so little known and that is how he wants it, because he knows that Art is a druidic cult which receives into its ranks all minds that rise high enough.

‘While the author JK Huysmans described Rops as:

…not confined himself, like his predecessors, to rendering the attitudes of bodies swayed by passion, but has elicited from flesh on fire the sorrows of fever-stricken souls, and the joys of warped minds; he has painted demonic rapture as other have painted mystical yearnings. Rops has not confined himself, like his predecessors, to rendering the attitudes of bodies swayed by passion, but has elicited from flesh on fir the sorrows of fever-stricken souls, and the joys of warped minds; he has painted demonic rapture as other have painted mystical yearnings.

‘Rops described his work as “structured mainly around the themes of love, suffering and death, with the central unifying theme of the woman, la femme fatale “in the full meaning of the word.” According to Rops the la femme fatale is:

‘Satan’s accomplice, [a woman who] becomes the supreme attraction which provokes the most extreme vices and torments in Man, a mere puppet.

‘This image is repeated throughout Rops work—and even when man attempts to repress his desire—as in his painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony—where (as Sigmund Freud notes) he has “placed Sin in the place of the Savior on the cross”

‘He seems to have known that when what has been repressed returns, it merges as the repressing force itself.

‘Rops’ work has been described as blasphemous, sadistic, sexist, misogynistic, pornographic, debased and even cruel—but that strikes me as responding to the effect or the surface rather than the substance of his work—which is far more complex and far more telling of Rops’ own fears and anxieties.’ — Paul Gallagher

 

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Further

Félicien Rops @ Wikipedia
The Musée Félicien Rops in Namur
Félicien Rops @ Internet Archive
BEYOND EROS: WORKS BY FÉLICIEN ROPS IN THE MICHAEL C. CARLOS MUSEUM
Book: ‘Félicien Rops: 1833 1898’
Fonds Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops: The Irreverent Symbolist
Photomechanical Processes in the Work of Félicien Rops
The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898
EROTICISM AND SATANISM IN THE ART OF FÉLICIEN ROPS

 

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Extras

Felicien Rops: The Art of Decadence

[RARE] Charles BAUDELAIRE – Face à Félicien Rops (DOCUMENTAIRE, 1994)

Musée Félicien Rops – Namur

Félicien Rops: Belgian Symbolist and Fin-de-Siècle Artist

 

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Joris-Karl Huysmans on Félicien Rops

 

Lust has not given birth, for its part, to any work that is truly strong. And we had to reach our time to find an artist who thought of really exploring these Antarctic regions unknown to art. Adopting the old concept of the Middle Ages, that man floats between Good and Evil, struggles between God and the Devil, between Purity which is of divine essence and Lust which is the Devil itself, Mr. Félicien Rops , with the soul of a Primitive in reverse, accomplished the opposite work of Memlinc; he penetrated and summarized Satanism in admirable plates which are, as inventions, as symbols, as incisive and nervous, fierce and heartbroken art, truly unique.
—-But, it must be said, Mr. Rops did not reach this synthesis of Evil at once. In the agile frontispieces that he once engraved for the libertine works reprinted by Poulet-Malassis in Brussels, he simply reveals a mocking and impious verve, a bizarre and quick imagination.
—-With a sometimes underlined spirit, he completes plates, sometimes elegant and ribboned like those of the 18th century – such as the etching which precedes the “Théâtre Gaillard” or the “Point de Lendemain,” by Vivant Denon – sometimes he summed up in very personal allegories, of absolute freedom of appearance. Among these, we can cite his etchings of the “Satirical Parnassus”, one: where flights of tiny women and little bacchantes climb after the rigid bounty of a Terme whose goat’s beard is bursts with joy, while, with his good father’s eyes, he contemplates one of the women who rides, distraught, on the top of his formidable member and who stretches out her arms, cries, swooning, grace, while his companions hang, screaming, from the spheres of its heavy wineskins; the other, representing the scene reversed: a troop of small aegypans who attack an armless faun, crowned with vine branches, with pointed ears and heavy breasts. She also delights, smiles, maternal and lascivious, at these little goats’ feet which take her throat, crawl on her large belly, poke into the pit of her navel, slip like a cat flap, into the half-open pod of her penis. But one of the most ingenious, most vehement works of this series is still the one which precedes the small volume of “Joyeusetés du Vidame de la Braguette”, by poor Glatigny.
—-Imagine a good scoundrel from Flanders sitting, his belly cool, holding the folded down basin of his breeches; he laughs to the point of tears, exuberates and chokes, while a swarm of cute creatures rushes over his prodigious nakedness which stands like a lighthouse whose base plunges into thick thickets.
—-And they are incredible, these dwarf nymphomaniacs! Never, until then, had we rendered with such a sense of hot flesh, with such passion, this madness of cats in heat! Tightened, they cling to the tufts with fists, climb the mast, go around the bags, hoist themselves on top of each other, devour each other and tumble into dying clusters. All this removed from a perennial and grounding design, drilling and sure. Then, in its boards, the Lingam displays the most unexpected, strange shapes. At rest, as in the frontispiece of Delvau’s “Erotic Dictionary”, it simulates a butterfly with a human face: the nose drawn by the soft stem, the eyes located at the top, under the fleece, the cheeks imitated by the two purses. At work, as in the Vidame etching, it turns into a figurine, the frenulum is sculpted into a nose and a mouth, the top becomes a Turkish turban, topped with a sour liquid.
—-But this etching to which many others could join is, in short, in the engraved work of Mr. Rops, only an alert and a joke. All those that I have reviewed are only ironic and scabrous, some almost boastful in their enthusiasm.
—-We will now point out his work itself; the woman will emerge demonic and terrible, treated by a talent which amplifies and condenses as the concept of Satanism of which I spoke appears, in a return of Catholic ideas.
—-Obviously, Mr. Rops had to embody Possession in the woman. And, in doing so, he agreed with the Fathers of the Church, with the entire Middle Ages, even Antiquity; because, dealing with couples accused of magic, Quintilian already wrote: “presumption is greater than the woman who is a witch. » Besides, it is enough for the woman to be bewitched for the man who approaches her to become infected; “Satan, through women, attracts men to his rope,” Bodin attested, paraphrasing the Middle Ages which affirmed, in all the declarations of its exorcists, that there were fifty female witches or demoniacs for every man.
—-Moreover, whether we accept or reject the theory of Satanism, is it not still the same today? Isn’t man led into misdemeanors and crimes by woman who is, herself, almost always lost to her fellow man? She is, in short, the great vase of iniquities and crimes, the charnel house of misery and shame, the true introducer of the embassies delegated into our souls by all vices.
—-We can also add, remaining within the circle traced by the Catholics, that the Demon was willingly incarnated in her and coupled, in this form, at night, with men. He was then the Succubus or the Ephialtes. Mr. Rops therefore followed the immutable tradition of the centuries, while, in his satanic work, he chose as the main character the woman, cursed by the Devil and venerating, in turn, the man who touches her.
—-On the other hand, he had to bring the Demon himself into the fearsome scenes he was meditating on.
—-And this provokes long reveries, evokes the monstrous memories that the demonographers have noted.
—-We think of leaving for the Sabbath, of the ointments extracted from mandrakes, henbanes, and the juices of nightshades, with which the women coated their bodies; we think of the philters with which they got drunk, philters composed, according to Del Rio, “of menstrual flow, semen, cat or donkey brains, hyena belly, wolf genitals and above all of hippomania which leaks from the parts of horses when they are in heat. » Then, the ride in the clouds is followed by the descent into the clearing where the Devil, in the form of the Satyr or the Goat, extends his buttock, black and hairy, which is kissed; all around, children walk toads around the ponds, because, says Lancre, “Satan keeps them away for fear of putting them off forever, by the horrible sight of so many things. » And the black mass is celebrated on the bare rump of a woman; we sit on benches, we gorge ourselves on human soup, on the flesh of children from which we suck the blood from the navel and the back of the neck; we chew the bones which, over the past year, cooked with certain herbs, have become soft like turnips. Deprived of the salt which prevents corruption, bread is made with these ears which rust has struck and in which seeds of disease, germs of death, ferment; the wine is a furious wine whose vines grew in the warm ashes of the volcanoes; blasphemies rise, we commune with the black host stamped with a goat, the torches go out, men, women, whirl, mate; each one plunges into the illicit vessels, tries to join, to practice incest, his daughter or his mother, strives to make them fat, in order to be able to slaughter and eat, in a future Sabbath, the child born of these hideous works!
—-In these actions there were ardent joys now lost and pains impossible in our time. Mr. Rops understood this and in some of his plates, he expressed these excesses of joy and suffering in a terrible way.
—-This is where the personality of these boards lies. A talented painter would perhaps have rendered this carnal ardor, this ferocity of rut, simulated, after nature, the ardent face of satyriasics and nymphomaniacs, finally created a material work confined in the aberrations of the reproductive senses, and without any other beyond that, but I now know of none who could, like Mr. Rops, have made the enraged soul of the cursed woman, possessed, poked, in all her ideas, fulminate by the genius of Evil.
—-We could, in short, after a few final explanations, summarize thus, I believe, the addition it brings to art:
—-Unlike his colleagues who were almost all born in stables and basements and whose education took place in municipal schools and howlers, Mr. Rops, exempt from worker or peasant origins and invested with a entirely literary education, is the only one who, among the plebs of pencil artists, is capable of formulating the syntheses of the frontispiece of which he remains the sole master, above all the only one who is capable of producing a work in which the past of the ‘eternal Vice.
—-Initiated in these matters, now omitted, by Baudelaire and by Barbey d’Aurévilly who had preceded him on the path of Satanism, he explored it to its limits and, in a different art, he is truly the one who noted the diabolical extent of carnal passions.
—-He restored to Lust so stupidly confined in the anecdote, so basely materialized by certain people, its mysterious omnipotence; he religiously placed it in the infernal framework in which it moves and, by this very fact, he did not create obscene and positive works, but rather Catholic works, fiery and terrible works.
—-He did not limit himself, like his predecessors, to rendering the passionate attitudes of bodies, but he brought forth burning flesh, the pains of feverish souls and the joys of distorted minds; he painted demonic ecstasy as others painted mystical impulses. Far from the century, in a time when materialist art only sees hysterics eaten by their ovaries or nymphomaniacs whose brains beat in the regions of the stomach, he celebrated, not the contemporary woman, not the Parisian, whose simpering graces and shady adornments escaped his apertises, but the essential and timeless Woman, the poisonous and naked Beast, the mercenary of Darkness, the absolute servant of the Devil.
—-He, in a word, celebrated this spiritualism of Lust that is Satanism, painting, in imperfect pages, the supernatural of perversity, the beyond of Evil.

 

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p.s. So sad about the great and sublime Shelley Duval RIP. Just her performance in Altman’s ‘Three Women’ alone is a masterclass. Lucy K Shaw and I had a fun conversation about FLUNKER and other things @ Interview Magazine if you want to read it. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s a pretty great novel, yeah. See, your mail experience matches a lot of my mail experiences to the T. Grr. I think the slaves genuinely like sniffing farts. Maybe it’s like scat with training wheels or something? I hope that cough didn’t projectile infect you. Surely, love has saved the day. Love making Satan real just long enough for him to record a cover version of ‘Superbeast’, G. ** Joe, Hi, Joe! So awesome to see you! Yes, the film mess is infuriating, but it will come to a conclusion somehow, I have no idea how, but it has to. Oh, god, no, never ever ever again will we work with or even acknowledge the existence of our producer from hell. The book you’re asking about is ‘Bobby BlueJacket’ by Michael P. Daley. I find Guibert very uneven. I hated a couple of his books so much that they kind of soured me on him, but ‘Friend’ is really good. His prose can be a bit precious/elitist, but he does it well when he does it well. Amazing news about you finishing the draft! Fantastic! I just finished the first draft of the script of Zac’s and my hopefully next film, so let’s root each other on. xoxo. ** M4ts, Hi, M4ts! Thank you for entering, it’s really good to meet you. Sure, when you’re at the point you need with that piece of writing, hit me up, and I’ll tell you where to send it to me. Great luck with that. Uh, yeah, I never had a confidence problem, but I never thought of myself in comparison to other writers. I never felt like what I was trying to do had any relationship to what other writers were doing, and I was lucky because the period when I grew up and worked at being a writer was a time when adventurousness and experimenting in books, films, music, etc. was prized and kind of viral, popularity-wise, and taken seriously by critics and stuff, so the world seemed like a positive, growing place. It still is, but now you have to hunt down artists and readers/ viewers who want things to surprise and revise them. But they’re there. I guess I don’t really take adulthood and professionalism seriously. I don’t see what they have to do with my writing. It’s just time passing and expectations shifting or something. I don’t know. I guess I would try not to let what’s dominant in the culture infect you. That’s just the color of the moment really. I like Walser, yes. ‘Jakob von Gunten’ is great. It had a real impact on me. ‘His style varied but intended always to hide what he had to say’: sounds so right, and that really speaks to me and to my writing, or my to attempt anyway. Again, pleasure to speak with you. Do come back if you feel like it. ** _Black_Acrylic, From living in Holland in the 80s and discovering football/soccer whilst there and then becoming a big fan of Ajax, I still always hope the Netherlands win, alas in this case. ** Lucas, Hi! Gosh, we’re hoping so about the festivals. That’s totally a legitimate approach. It’s coming from you, and you’re totally unique, and your art is/will be totally unique, so it will be unique and not like anything else by default. It can’t be tired, because your work is new. No worries. I hope luck lets you get the developed photos before the weekend presumably stalls things out for a day or so. Big day today to you. It’s nice and cold and grey here. I’m going to be able to wear my coat outside and everything. ** Tosh Berman, Ha ha, well, ‘met’ is pushing it. Do you know that restaurant Dan Tana’s, right next to the Troubadour? My parents took the family to dinner there, and there was Cary Grant sitting across the restaurant having dinner with some young guy who I now suppose must’ve been his boyfriend or fuckbuddy, and I had my autograph book with me, and I just sort of brashly walked over to his table and asked if I could have his autograph. He glanced up at me, and said, ‘Mm’, and took my autograph book, opened it, and scrawled his name and gave it back. I said, ‘Thank you’, and he smiled fakely at me and said ‘Mm’. But his ‘mm’ did have that kind of Cary Grant-ish lilt to it. ** Pascal O’Loughlin, Whoa, Pascal! Man oh man, it’s been a long time! Not since the google murder of my old blog, right? How great to see you! Thank you a lot about our films. I’m so happy to hear that. The problems finishing the new one are hellish, but it wil be finished and birthed whatever that takes. How are you? What’s going on with you, if you don’t mind saying? Wow, really good to see you, old pal! ** Thomas H, It was trippy reading myself. I liked it. Nice: the drive. I remember Ruffles. ‘Rrrruffles have rrrrridges’, as the ads used to say. Canadians have that sweet accent that ‘South Park’ used to max out. I have Canadian friends who talk like that. Thanks for the backstory re: Silicon Knights. That’s sad. It has been one of the long-standing biggest mysteries to me why there was never an ‘Eternal Darkness 2’. Your read on the ‘Frisk’ film sounds right. Araki was supposed to direct it at one point, but he backed out. Maybe I’ll try to watch it only looking for its time capsule qualities. That might work. Thanks a lot. Happy weekend’s start. What are you looking forward to most in Seattle? ** Steve, I think there might still be a couple of untranslated Guibert books, but most of them are in English now, I think. I liked your song. Your friend’s description or it kind of wonderfully nailed it, haha. Thanks, yeah, about the programmer’s enthusiasm. It really was much, much needed. I saw that VAS-TU RECONCER was playing here, but I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it’s still around. I’ll check, Thanks. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David! I’m so happy to see you back again! Your love of ‘Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train’ its totally legendary. And completely understandable. I hope you’re doing really well. Love, me. ** Nika Mavrody, No, I don’t know slambook, but I will investigate. Hm. I do know that about Trump, yes. Me too too! ** Joseph, Hey. There’s no late around here really. Unless I’m late, I guess. Witchcraft shops are cool, but, no, I love the magic tricks themselves, all those colorful tubes and rabbit-eating hats and trick cards and magic scarves and all that stuff. There’s a Museum of Witchcraft here. It’s actually really spooky, like the proprietors and guards are going to kidnap you or something. Anyone to whom Halloween was a huge deal is a big deal to me by default. Awesome if the post transpires. Beat that dumb job into submission. ** Harper, Ah, cool, about the favoritism of that book. I also really like its kind of sequel: ‘The Compassion Protocol’. Barcelona, nice! It’s going to be hot there, duh, I hope you can sort out the blood test in time. Me too: I’m so, so sad about Shelley Duvall. I adore her. ‘Three Women’ is greatness. She’s incredible in everything. I met he once. She gave me her autograph. I was speechless in awe around her, and she was so completely amazing and wacky and sweet to me. ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah. Good Iowa-derived books/writers? I’d have to think about that. I’m sure there must be some. I have a couple of friends who are in the Workshop right now. They say they have to fight to write anything out of the ordinary. I think I must’ve really liked the idea of confusing and amazing people by doing magic tricks because I still kind of have that same aspiration with my writing. ** PL, Hi, P. I’m alright, thanks. The Britney thing made for a good story to tell, but it’s too long for the p.s. Exciting about the Salome short. Bated breath over here. There have been slaves in the posts who were Black, but they’re rare because, at least in my searching, self-identified slaves who are Black are quite rare on those sites. The vast majority of the members of those sites who are Black identify as masters. And the rare Black slaves’s profile texts are almost inevitably racist-bating in a way that I find uninteresting and uncomfortable. So that probably explains it? All’s okay here. Make Friday count. ** Cletus, Thanks a lot, pal. ** nat, Hi, nat! I do tend to urge people looking for books to read to give special consideration to French books. Thanks about the posts. ‘Cart Life’ actually sounds kind of exciting to weird me. I’ll look into it. I should subscribe to a magic magazine! I didn’t realise they still exist. I used to subscribe to two ‘haunted house attraction builders’ magazines but they petered out. Nothing wrong with pulpy. Pulpy can facilitate greatness. And if it causes you to create super juicy characters, what more encouragement do you need, haha. But seriously. Norway did seem photo-defiant. Our photos were puny looking too. I would pursue ‘Zenless Zone Zero’ but the gambling aspect is too dangerous. I have to watch my pennies. Cool, see you on Monday too, then. ** Oscar 🌀, Hey. Oh, yes, yes, that shirt! Convince not to have one made and wear it everywhere. Please convince me. I beg you. Do you know what a sigil is? Well, I asked a sigil making app to built you a special sigil made out of a secret message that you can only absorb into your consciousness by staring at the sigil lengthily and fixedly. Tha’s how sigils work. So, start staring in 3 … 2 … 1 … Go! You’re moving in with your boyfriend! Very cool! Love is the best! And I’m sure that continual proximity won’t harm yours. I’m still waiting to hear Zac’s thoughts on the script. Hopefully today. One should only eat Krispy Kreme donuts when they’re fresh from the oven, so don’t eat the supermarket ones, only eat ones at Krispy Kreme outlets that cook their donutts on premises. Happy Friday to you too!! ** Right. If you don’t like or feel any inclination to like Felicien Rops, you’re not going to have much fun in my galerie today. See you tomorrow.

 

‘To read about Hervé Guibert and his work feels like preparing for an encounter with a mythical creature. Largely unknown outside of France before his book To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life was released in 1989, and still peripheral amongst English-speaking readers until a recent resurgence of his work, I was intrigued by critics’ descriptions of him and his work.

‘Often referred to as an enfant terrible within literary circles, Guibert shot to fame with To the Friend. The book captured France’s attention as much for its unblinking account of his diagnosis and subsequent life with HIV/AIDS as for recounting the intimate last days of his friend and public intellectual Michel Foucault, who died of the same disease in 1984. This “betrayal” caused a minor scandal, gaining Guibert notoriety for exploiting the lives and secrets of his friends for literary gain. These days he is more favourably interpreted as a writer who exposes that which is covered over and unsaid, confronting society with scenes we are complicit in choosing not to see, hear, or understand. Yet the whiff of scandal remains.

‘Then there is Guibert’s reputation as the heir to the “body-smeared” literary tradition of Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, et al. Utilising visceral and direct prose, his work is full of images of sex and violence, apparently designed to shock and provoke, with Julian Lucas describing him as “a young man out to trigger the middle-class.”

‘Couple this lurid legacy with the fact that Guibert primarily wrote autofiction, a literary style that blurs the lines between memoir and fiction, and his work takes on the mythical status of a chimaera: part death, part sex, part exposé. Simultaneously and deliberately shocking and intimate, true and untrue, I expected Guibert’s To the Friend to deliver a sort of sensual linguistic assault, without my knowing what to believe and what to doubt.

‘Perhaps it is my own literary naivete, but I found no such mythical beast upon sitting down to read To the Friend. Yes, it is sexually explicit, unswervingly depicting the exploits of Guibert and his predominantly queer, male friendship group. Yes, the book reveals secrets and intimate details that one might argue are divulged insensitively. And, yes, it remains impossible to decipher objective truth from artistic liberty. But underneath Guibert’s impulse to unveil and uncover the explicit, the private, and the morbid shines an uncalculated tenderness and honesty. In To the Friend, Guibert not only shows a deep sensitivity to his own struggle with HIV/AIDS but also to the inner lives of his friends, doctors and all those who found themselves bound up in that desperate moment in history, “relishing the moments of sweet humanity that never failed to spring from the harshest cruelty.”

‘To the Friend’s narrative begins with the beguiling statement, “I had AIDS for three months.” Upon writing this sentence, Guibert truly did not know whether the eponymous friend would or would not save his life. Casting back through the 1980s, he tells the story of his and his friends’ encounter with the unfolding AIDS epidemic. The narrative spans from first rumours and quips (“a cancer that would hit only homosexuals, no, that’s too good to be true!” laughs Foucault) to Foucault’s death and Guibert’s degrading health, and finally to the promise from Guibert’s close friend “Bill” that he could deliver his band of friends to health through a revolutionary vaccine.

‘Upon starting To the Friend, it is hard not to be disorientated by Guibert’s writing style. He employs long, winding sentences that disintegrate into a swirl of different thoughts, observations, and asides. The clauses trip over each other as one tries to understand where his point is headed and to remember where it started. One such sentence spans a full three pages.

‘However, once one has settled into the book, the reader becomes acclimatised to the speed and cadence of Guibert’s thought. That three-page sentence ends up forming one of the book’s most entertaining chapters. Guibert is scrambling to find a disused hospital on the outskirts of Paris where he is supposed to undergo a new battery of tests in order to determine which phase of the illness he is in. This morbid mission unfolds somewhat calamitously, animated by Guibert’s talent for capturing people’s faces, laying bare the emotions that flash across them, and filling every chance encounter with significance. Guibert’s ability to jump from the quotidian to the terrifyingly existential in the same sentence provides To the Friend with a black humour that is immediately endearing.

‘It is through these long phrases of thought, these links of event and emotion, that Guibert plays out his story. Split into 100 chapters, To the Friend reads as a series of vignettes, jumping between years, rendezvous with friends, and meetings with doctors in a structure that again adds to the reader’s initial disorientation. But it is through Guibert’s relationship with his inner circle that one steadily becomes moored in his world as the creeping realisation that they have all been swept up in a common destiny takes hold.’ — Matthew Graham

 

12 photographs by Herve Guibert

 

Bio

‘After working as a filmmaker and actor in his teenaged years, Herve Guibert turned to photography and journalism. In 1978, he successfully applied for a job at France’s prestigious evening paper Le Monde and published his second book, Les aventures singulières (Éditions de minuit).In 1984, Guibert shared a César award for best screenplay with Patrice Chéreau for L’homme blessé. Guibert had met Chéreau in the 1970s during his theatrical years.

‘Guibert’s writing style was inspired by the French writer Jean Genet. Three of his lovers occupied an important place in his life and work: Thierry Jouno, director of an institute for the blind whom he met in 1976, and which led to his novel Des aveugles; Michel Foucault whom he met in 1977; and Vincent M., a teenager of fifteen, who inspired his novel Fou de Vincent.

‘In January 1988 Guibert was diagnosed with AIDS. From then on, he worked at recording what was left of his life. In June the following year, he married Christine, the partner of Thierry Jouno, so that his royalty income would eventually pass to her and her two children. In 1990, Guibert publicly revealed his HIV status in his novel À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (tran. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). Guibert immediately found himself the focus of media attention, featured in newspapers and appearing on several television talk shows.

‘Two more books also detailing the progress of his illness followed: Le Protocole compassionnel (trans. The Compassionate Protocol) and L’Homme au chapeau rouge (trans. The Man With The Red Hat) which was released posthumously in January 1992, the same month French television screened La Pudeur ou l’impudeur, a home-made film by Guibert of his last year as he lost his battle against AIDS. Almost blind as a result of disease, he attempted to end his life just before his 36th birthday, and died two weeks later.’ — herveguibert.net

 

Media

from Guibert’s ‘La Pudeur ou L’impudeur’ (1991)

clip: ‘L’Homme Blesse’, dir: Patrice Chereau; written: Herve Guibert & P.C.

Patrice Chéreau & Hervé Guibert, César 1984 du Meilleur Scénario Original et Dialogues pour L’HOMME BLESSÉ

Herve Guibert on photographer Bernard Faucon (in French)

 

Further

Herve Guibert Website (in French)
Pour Hervé Guibert: Entretien avec Guillaume Ertaud et Arnaud Genon
DELIRIUM: A Herve Guibert Site (in French)
Herve Guibert @ answers.com
Book: Jean-Pierre Boule ‘Herve Guibert: Voices of the Self’
Buy Herve Guibert’s books (in English & French)

 

Interview (1991)

 

The New Observer. You have just republished your first book, published in 1977, Death Propaganda, but you have added a series of youthful texts.

Hervé Guibert. I found them during a move. They were in notebooks, and most of them I had never put them down. They were not typed. I started reworking them. It was a period where I was doing nothing; right after To the friend who didn’t save my life. After finishing this book, I began, the next day, to write another one called The Death of Gaspard. I was at the Villa Medici. Eugene Savitzkaya was my neighbor and he told me: “Stop writing this book, you’ll go crazy.” I thought he was right, that I couldn’t string together a book about other. So I stopped working. And I went in the summer, as usual, to the island of Elba.

N.O. And then what did you do?

H. Guibert. There was a weird thing happening inside me that was born out of irritation. There is a story by Thomas Bernhard called Trees to be felled with the subtitle: “An irritation”. He tells of a dinner in town, and he falls headlong into a whole bunch of people. At that time, I was very irritable and my friends irritated me. I said to myself: I have always shot arrows at everyone in my texts, I have to get to the end of that. I’m going to take my three best friends and I’m going to go down on them. When I told what I was doing to the first of these friends, the one who is in my last books (and who was T. in the first), he replied: “I don’t care . » I didn’t tell the second friend. But I admitted it to the third. He was upset. I realized that my friends could be as fragile as me, if not more, and that I was really going to hurt them. So I decided not to publish it.

N. O. Do you write a lot of things that you leave aside?

H. Guibert. Yes. There was another book at that time. Simenon had just died. I had never read it. And then I discovered Bernanos’s Journal of a Country Priest, which I found astonishing. So I launched into a kind of village novel. It takes place in Provence, but with Italian models, people from a village where I go. It’s a sort of detective story, with ghosts, reappearances, in the Simenon mind as I imagined it. But I decided not to publish it either.

N.O. You didn’t think it was good?

H. Guibert. I will publish it one day. I’ll take it back. But not for now.

N.O. And that’s when you found yourself without “work” and without a project?

H. Guibert. Yes that’s it. My condition had deteriorated. I stopped working for months. I didn’t feel like anything. My doctor wanted me to take antidepressants, and I didn’t want to. I had all the fears of antidepressants, of madness, of suicide… I was stagnating. And I came across these youth notebooks that we were talking about. It was a bit of a literary discovery of myself.

N.O. You started writing very young.

H. Guibert. It all started with scribbles in notebooks. I was in second grade at La Rochelle high school and I was getting bored in class. I was the Parisian; I wasn’t really liked. And I wasn’t looking to belong, to be included. Rather, I wanted to exclude myself, to be different. I sat at the back of the class, and that’s when I started writing poems. And then I continued to write. And that gave rise, a little later, to the youthful texts that I have just published.

N.O. You hadn’t tried to publish them before?

H. Guibert. I proposed them to Régine Deforges, who wanted to publish them. She published things that I liked. She had published, for example, Le Nécrophile by G. Wittkop, which is a text that I really like. But that’s when she got into trouble with the law. She had to give up publishing these children’s stories which are the first texts in the collection. And when she started publishing again, she specialized in erotic literature. She told me: if you have texts of an erotic nature, I would be happy to read them. It was in 75, I had returned to Paris. I was very alone. I lived in a maid’s room and I did journalism: I worked at Vingt Ans, a Filipacchi publication, where I wrote heartfelt letters, sexological files, film criticism… Under several pseudonyms. And then I had to have emergency surgery to prevent peritonitis. I had what we call surgical shock. I woke up too soon after the operation and experienced unbearable pain. I wrote what would become the first Death Propaganda text. A slightly crazy text where I said: “Who will want to film my suicide, this bestseller? » It was a somewhat premonitory text. I was talking about the “poison that penetrates with the kiss”.

N.O. Is it this premonitory side that pushed you to republish it today? Or rather the literary rediscovery of yourself?

H. Guibert. Yes, that’s more of it: a rediscovery of myself, of how I have progressed, of how things have transformed. And also what I was reading at the time I wrote these texts. Because, when I reread them, I see who the writer is behind them.

N.O. You actually say in your latest book that you have always written in admiration of a writer.

H. Guibert. I believe that you are a writer by being a reader. The writer I was reading, or his shadow, or his ghost, almost became a character in the fiction I was writing. He is both a character and a model. I never had the fantasy of modernity, of literary invention. I never wanted to do something new, new. I had these loves for writers and I tried to let myself be carried away by them.

N.O. Who are they?

H. Guibert. Obviously, that changes a lot. I went from Jules Verne to Sartre. For these texts, I only read sexual things. So I only wrote sexual things. But it was the discovery of pain that gave me this violence. There was also Francis Bacon. Because painting had as much of an impact on me as literature. Bacon’s paintings were everything I loved: the color, the violence, the butchery, the body, the sodomy, the embrace of two men… the day Death Propaganda came out, Bacon had the opening of his exhibition at Claude Bernard. I brought him my book.

N.O. Some of your texts seem impregnated with Genet. Was it a memorable read?

H. Guibert. Determinant. For me Genet, it was absolute freedom. This meant that we could write everything. While being guilty.

N.O. Have you reread it recently?

H. Guibert. I continue to love it. There are writers who disappointed me, but not Genet. One of the other crucial experiences was Bataille. With all the sacrilegious and adolescent side, like that of going to piss in the font or confessing sodomy by priests. Bataille, Genet, that was my apprenticeship.

N.O. And then?

H. Guibert. There was Guyotat. When I wrote You made me form ghosts, I wanted to mix two teenage loves: on the one hand Eden, Eden, Eden and Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers for the epic fresco aspect, and Cobra by Severo Sarduy, a hysterical baroque book, a crazy book, which I loved, which really left an impression on me.

N.O. Had you already met Roland Barthes at that time?

H. Guibert. No, but I loved him. I said I took my book to Bacon. The two other people to whom I wanted to give it – well-meaning friends might say that it was careerist behavior – were Michel Foucault because he was a neighbor and I saw him passing by with his shopping bags… And also because it was Michel Foucault, of course, even though I had never read anything by him. But now, when I go on a trip, I always take a book of his, to accompany me. It’s a way to stay with him. And the third person was Barthes. I sent him my book. The story is astonishing. One day, I met a film critic who said to me: “Aren’t you going to Barthes’ seminar? Come, it is not necessary to arrive several hours in advance to get a place. Barthes lets us in through a small door. » So I went. Barthes arrived, shy, he let us in, I had a special place, in the middle of the amphitheater. And Barthes, in a peaceful silence, began to speak. And I said to myself: what a fool I am for being here! This guy is deadly, annoying to death!… So I got up, I disturbed everyone. Barthes saw that someone was coming out. And I thought: too bad, I don’t want to experience this boredom anymore. I got home, I opened my mailbox there was a letter from Barthes. One of my great joys. He had read my book and said to me: “I would like to talk with you about the relationship between writing and fantasy, but without knowing you. By letters. » We wrote to each other for a long time. He made me write the following text: “Death Propaganda No. 0”. He had to write a preface, he made it a condition that I sleep with him. And for me it wasn’t possible. At that time, I couldn’t have had a relationship with a man of that age. We had some rather stormy correspondence and he wrote a ten-page text, quite beautiful, called “Fragment for H”. Which I published much later in the Other Journal. This is how I knew Barthes. He was also very delicate. I really loved him. Although I found it boring. He complained constantly. He was always overwhelmed, by fame, by requests for prefaces, which he was unable to write. He felt harassed by the request.

N.O. A friendship was nevertheless established.

H. Guibert. I was in the secondary zone of Barthes’ friendship. While I entered the primordial zone of friendship of Michel Foucault.

N.O. Which of your books is your favorite?

H. Guibert. I prefer the one that people will like the most. The one that will sell the most. Because, for me, writing is an attempt at communication. This is why I am so happy and so supported by the success of my latest books. Not for a simple question of circulation, of number of copies, but because I achieved my goal: to have readers. It’s incredible to go from 5,000 to 130,000 readers. These are meetings.

N.O. What kinds of meetings? And with who?

H. Guibert. Women. A lot of women. Nurses, nannies, mothers, deplorable saints. A lot of young girls too… It’s disturbing.

 

Book

Herve Guibert To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
Semiotext(e)

‘In 1990 Hervé Guibert gained wide recognition and notoriety with the publication of A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. This novel, one of the most famous AIDS fictions in French or any language, recounts the battle of the first-person narrator not only with AIDS but also with the medical establishment on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘Guibert’s work is a brilliant example of the emphasis on disclosure that marks recent queer writing-in contrast to the denial and cryptic allusion that characterized much of the work by gay writers of previous generations. He treats the notions of falsehood and truth with a postmodern hand: as overlapping constructs rather than mutually exclusive ones – or, to use Michel Foucault’s expression, as “games with truth.”‘ — Ralph Sarkonak

 

Excerpts

More precisely, for three months I believed I was condemned to die of that mortal illness called AIDS…. But after three months, something completely unexpected happened that convinced me I could and almost certainly would escape this disease, which everyone still claimed was always fatal…. That I was going to make it, that I would become, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, one of the first people on earth to survive this deadly malady.

*

On this twenty-sixth day of December, 1988, as I begin this book, in Rome…several months after those three months when I was truly convinced I was lost, and after the months that followed when I was able to believe myself saved by the luckiest of chances, wavering now between doubt and lucidity, having reached the limits of both hope and despair, I don’t know what to think about any of these crucial questions, about this alternation of certain death and sudden reprieve….

*

Today, January 4, 1989, I tell myself I’ve got only seven days, exactly seven days to tell the story of my illness, and of course I’ll never meet the deadline, which is going to play havoc with my peace of mind, because I’m supposed to call Dr. Chandi on the afternoon of January 11 so that he can tell me over the phone the results of the tests I had to have on December 22…thus beginning a new phase of the illness…plus I’d hardly slept at all for fear of missing the appointment made a month earlier…and when I did get any sleep that night before those awful tests when they drew off an appalling amount of my blood, it was only to dream that I’d been prevented for various reasons from keeping this appointment that was so decisive for my survival…and I’m actually writing all this on the evening of January 3 because I’m afraid I’ll collapse during the night, pressing on fiercely toward my goal and its incompletion….

*

‘Oh yes, your blood test. Is it time for your appointment already? tomorrow, my God – how quickly time flies!“ Later I wondered if he’d said that intentionally to remind me that my days were now numbered, that I shouldn’t waste them writing under or about another name than my own, and I remembered that other, almost ritual phrase he’d used a month before, when he’d studied all my latest blood analyses, noted the sudden inroads the virus had made, and asked me to have a new blood test to check for the presence of the antigen P24…so that we could set in motion the administrative procedure required to obtain the drug AZT, currently the only treatment for full-blown AIDS. “Now,” he remarked, “if we do nothing, it’s no longer a question of years, but of months.”

*

It was on the afternoon of December 22 that I decided, with Dr. Chandi, not to go to that appointment on January 11, which he would keep for me in order to obtain the anticipated medication, playing a role on both sides, if he had to, or making me think that this was the only way to get the drug, through this pretence of my presence, by using up the time assigned for our appointment to fool the monitoring committee. I’m supposed to call him on the afternoon of January 11 to find out my test results, and that’s why I’m saying that as of today, January 4, I have only seven days left in which to retrace this history of my illness, because whatever Dr. Chandi will reveal to me on the afternoon of January 11, whether it’s good news or bad (although it can only be more or less bad, as he’s taken care to let me infer), might well threaten this book, risk crushing it right at the source, turning my meter back to zero and erasing the fifty-seven pages already written before kicking my bucket for me.

*

1988 brought the revelation of my illness, a sentence without possibility of appeal, followed three months later by that chance event that managed to persuade me I could be saved. In this chronology summing up and pinpointing the warning signs of the disease over a period of eight years, when we now know that its incubation period is between four and a half and eight years… the physiological accidents are no less decisive than the sexual encounters, the premonitions no less telling than the wishes that try to banish them. That’s the chronology that becomes my outline, except when I discover that progression springs from disorder.

*

As a matter of fact, I haven’t done a stitch of work on this book these last few days, at the crucial moment for the deadline I’ve given myself for telling the story of my illness; I’ve been passing the time unhappily, waiting for this new verdict or this semblance of a verdict…but today, January 11, which should have been the day of the verdict, I’m biting my nails down to the quick, having been left entirely in the dark about something that is perfectly clear to me, because I tried calling Dr. Chandi at his office, but couldn’t reach him…. So here I am tonight without the results, upset at not knowing them on the evening of January 11 the way I’ve been expecting to ever since December 22, having spend last night, I might add, dreaming that I wouldn’t have them….

*

After we’d had our blood samples taken…we saw one boy come out again absolutely in shock…paralyzed at the news written all over his face…. It was a terrifying vision for Jules and me, which projected us one week into the future, and at the same time relieved us by showing us the worst that could happen, as though we were living it at the same time, precipitously, second-hand…. Suspecting that our results would be bad and wishing to speed up the process…Dr. Chandi had already sent us to the Institute Alfred-Fournier for the blood analyses that are done after a seropositive result, specifically to ascertain the progress of the HIV virus in the body…. Looking over my lab slip, the nurse asked me, “How long have you known that you’re seropositive?” I was so surprised I couldn’t answer her. The results of the blood analysis were to be sent to us in about ten days, before the results of the seropositivity test would be known, in that precise interval of uncertainty…. On the morning we went to find out the results of the seropositivity tests he told me my blood workup wasn’t good; that they’d already seen the bad news there even without knowing the results of the other test. At that instant I understood that a calamity had hit us, that we were beginning a period of rampant misfortune from which there would be no escape. I was like that poor boy devastated by his test results.

*

I’ve re-counted the days on my calendar: between January 23 [1988], when I’d received my death-sentence at the little clinic on the Rue du Jura, and this March 18, when I’d received another news flash that might prove decisive in seeping away what I’d been officially told was irreversible, fifty-six days had gone by. I’d lived for fifty-six days, sometimes cheerfully, sometimes in despair, alternating between sweet forgetfulness and ferocious obsession, trying to get used to my impending doom. Now I was entering a new phase, a limbo of hope and uncertainty, that was perhaps more terrible to live through than the one before.

*

…I was afraid this new pact with fate might upset the slow advance – which was rather soothing actually – of inevitable death…. For though it was certainly an inexorable illness, it wasn’t immediately catastrophic, it was an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life…. And unhappiness, once you were completely sunk in it, was a lot more livable than the presentiment of unhappiness, a lot less cruel, in fact, than one would have thought. If life was nothing but the presentiment of death and the constant torture of wondering when the axe would fall, then AIDS, by setting an official limit to our life span – six years of seropositivity, plus two years with AZT in the best of cases, or a few months without it – made us men who were fully conscious of our lives, and freed us from our ignorance. If Bill were to file an appeal against my death sentence with his vaccine, he’d plunge me back into my former state of ignorance.

*

It’s strange to wish someone Happy New Year when you know the person might not live all the way through it: there’s no situation more outrageous than that, and to handle it you need simple, unaffected courage, the ambiguous freedom of things left unsaid, a secret understanding braced with a smile and sealed with a laugh, so in that instant your New Year’s wish has a crucial but not weighty solemnity.

*

I’ve decided to be calm, to follow to the end this novelistic logic that so hypnotizes me, at the expense of all idea of survival. yes, I can write it, and that’s undoubtedly what my madness is – I care more for my book than for my life, I won’t give up my book to save my life, and that’s what’s going to be the most difficult thing to make people believe and understand.

*

When I learned I was going to die, I’d suddenly been seized with the desire to write every possible book – all the ones I hadn’t written yet, at the risk of writing them badly: a funny, nasty book, then a philosophical one – and to devour these books almost simultaneously, in the reduced amount of time available, and to write not only the books of my anticipated maturity but also, with the speed of light, the slowly ripened books of my old age.
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Yeah, virtually every still extant magic shop has had to branch way out to survive or, as in yours’ case, go wack. It’s sad, so sad. It might be a France only or even Paris only upmarket move on LIDL’s part, I don’t know. Or Zac was tripping. I’ll go find out. The AS people are indeed extremely cool and nice, yeah. One of my favorite punishing experiences ever. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, wow. That book is kind of rare, I think. ‘He Cried’ is a great song. It was the last hit of their genius period. I had my ‘Flunkers’ sent to a friend’s place because of my mail problems, and he’s on vacation, so I have to wait until he gets back to pick them up. Haha, thanks, I’ll take the mobile shop’s plate’s message as seriously as if it was God whispering in my ear, I promise. Love putting an end to the suddenly very popular trend of slaves who want to sniff farts and masters who want to fart, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I had never heard of ‘Mr. Benn’, but, based on a quick peek, I intend to descend into its rabbit hole. What beautiful, odd animation. Thank you, sir. And thank you again for your musical mastermindery. ** ted rees, Hi, Ted! Nice, or past nice. I was so into magic as a kid that I belonged to three different Magic-Trick-of-the-Month Clubs where they sent you magic trick through the mail monthly. Nothing cocky about acknowledging the facts objectively. Yeah, the moving forward phase. Strange one. But you will any sec. I mean, I went all prose at a certain point, so … But my poetry was never remotely as good as yours. Embrace the duo? Excited to see the prose when those pieces pop out. xoxo. ** Steve, New song, cool, it’s been a while. Everyone, The multi-talented Steve has … he’ll tell you: ‘I released a new single, “Boot Camp Healing,” yesterday. On FB, someone described it as a church organ having a nervous breakdown.’ Needless to say that description is a hell of a magnet. I sent a draft of the short film script to Zac yesterday. He’s reading it, and, assuming he likes it, he’ll have changes and additions and things, and I’ll continue. So far so good. We have a DP in mind for the film, so that’s progress too. Thank you for asking. ** Lucas, Hi. Hopefully I’ve saved you a lot of misery. My Wednesday was pretty okay. A few days ago, a programmer at a big film festival that we hadn’t submitted the film to wrote to me to say he’d heard about our film and he had a slot open in his section and wanted to see it. So we sent it even though we weren’t sure his section was right for the film. Yesterday he wrote back to say he couldn’t take the film for technical reasons, but he was extremely enthusiastic about the film, said it’s the best film he’s seen this year, totally raved about it, and he said he’ll help us find a US distributor and stuff. Our film has been such a hostage of depressing money and producer shit for months, and hearing that was the boost we really needed to hear. So that was kind of joyous and restored our confidence and stuff. Ugh, about the development delay, but I guess be glad it wasn’t one of those 3D disposables I told you about when you were here, because then you’d have months of waiting ahead. Wow, great collage! You’re so good. That’s really exciting looking! Will you use some of your pre-existing collages in the zine? Awesome. Bon day! ** Sarah, Hi. Originally, there was going to be section of ‘God Jr.’ where the father tracked down and met with the designer of the game his son was obsessed with. I even wrote that section, but it just wasn’t good enough. Maybe I’m better enough that I could try again. So cool that you wanted to be a gamedev when you were a kid. That’s much more exciting than little me wanting to be a magician. I know a bit about ‘crunch’ in games. Really, your story sounds really, really exciting to me. I’m so hoping it pans out. Yeah, do be very judicious when reading Iowa Writer’s Workshop type-stuff. That stuff’ll kill you. Seriously. I know some really interesting writers who went that way and were turned into just blah ‘literary’ writers like hundreds of others. Not long at all, pal. Happiest Thursday! ** Thomas H, Hi. No, I didn’t see your comment. Maybe it came in late? I miss late arriving ones sometimes, and I never check back and look at the comments from previous days’ posts, bad me. Thank you about the election. It was great, even though things are a big mess now with the hung parliament, but oh well. I’m so happy people still play ‘Eternal Darkness’. I don’t think it’s had a Switch upgrade release? Strange again. I haven’t watched the ‘Frisk’ film in 30-ish years, but I’m pretty sure I’d still think it’s a piece of crap apart from maybe Parker Posey and Craig Chester and the Coil/Lee Ranaldo score. I guess I’m open to a counterargument for it if you and anyone wants to make one. I would imagine that Seattle will be more tolerable even if it’s a little more overheated than it usually is? Hope so. Really happy Thursday to you! ** Harper, Hi. I went to lots of magic shops as a kid, and my memory is that the proprietors were always bored and irritable people. Strange. Mm, as a kid, I collected coins, yes, and autographs. I lived in LA, so you would see stars once in a while, and I carried around an autograph book and would corners stars when I saw them. I had a lot. The only ones I can remember at the moment are Lucille Ball, the woman who played Granny on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’, Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees, the guy who played Artemis Gordon on the ‘Wild Wild West’ TV show, and Cary Grant. Ugh, about the blood test mess up. Amazing and vast luck sorting that out. I’m so sorry pal. Ugh. ** Darby 🎹, *Plink, plink* I’m down with the balloon guy. I’ve never seen a balloon guy over here. Or a mime. Not a single mime! It’s true: within, like, a year, my high school friends had dwindled down to maybe two people, and the rest faded into the unknown future. I think they’re not liars. You’re cool, and they either see that, or they’re boring and lazy minded. Yes, my theater collaborator friend studied puppetry, and almost all of our pieces have either puppets, mannequins, or life-size dolls in them. I’ve never tried the “clickity-click-click” sounds effects. I don’t know if I have them. I’ll check. You’re not a lazy writer, you’re an avant-garde writer, which is the best kind of writer! ** Justin D, Hi, Justin. Thanks! I like the sound of your dad. But then I still have some fake vomit rubbery prank thing in one of my drawers just waiting for the most innocent culprit. I think we’ll hear whether we’re in the festivals this month sometime. An acceptance wouldn’t fix the big problems, but it would force the problem-makers to find a way to let us finish the film out of necessity. And it would free the film from the prison in which they are keeping it. ‘Serial Mom’ is god. Wow, there kind of couldn’t be a more quintessential 90s film line up than the one you have in your sights. Mm, I don’t think I have a comfort film, do I? When I was a kid they showed ‘Wizard of Oz’ on TV every Xmas, and I watched it a million times, so that qualifies, but … I think I always want to see something new? Maybe newness is my comfort food? I don’t know. I have comfort music? Do you? ** Okay. I’d thought the blog had spotlit this great book in the past, but I was wrong, so I’m asking the blog to flood it with light for you today. See you tomorrow.