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Currently reading: Le Spleen de Paris (1869) - Charles Baudelaire

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2006, July 05; 19:05 ::: Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) - Edgar Allan Poe

In search of prose poetry.

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) - Edgar Allan Poe [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

To the few who love me and whom I love -- to those who feel rather than to those who think -- to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities -- I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:- let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. --Poe, 1848 [...]

Eureka, an essay written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that anticipated the Big Bang theory by 80 years, as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox. Though described as a "prose poem" by Poe, who wished it to be considered as art, this work is a remarkable scientific and mystical essay unlike any of his other works. He wrote that he considered Eureka to be his career masterpiece.

Poe eschewed the scientific method in his Eureka. He argued that he wrote from pure intuition, not the Aristotelian a priori method of axioms and syllogisms, nor the empirical method of modern science set forth by Francis Bacon. For this reason, he considered it a work of art, not science, but insisted that it was still true. Though some of his assertions have later proven to be false (such as his assertion that gravity must be the strongest force--it is actually the weakest), others have been shown to be surprisingly accurate and decades ahead of their time. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe#Physics_and_cosmology [Jul 2006]

"Eureka" is a prose poem by Edgar Allan Poe from (1848) in which he describes his intuitive conception of the universe. It is dedicated to the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_%28Edgar_Allan_Poe%29 [Jul 2006]

See also: 1848 - prose poetry - Poe


2006, July 05; 19:05 ::: Édouard Chimot

Édouard Chimot Google gallery of which I especially like this work and here is a splendid illustration by Chimot for Baudelaire's Paris Spleen.

See also: Le Spleen de Paris (1869) - erotica


2006, July 05; 19:05 ::: To Each His Own Chimera (1869) - Charles Baudelaire

From Le Spleen de Paris, 1999 translation by Cat Nilan

Beneath a broad, grey sky, upon a broad, dusty plain, without trails, without grass, without a thistle or a nettle, I met several men who walked bent over.

Each one of them carried upon his back an enormous Chimera, as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or the gear of a Roman foot-soldier.

But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight; on the contrary, it enveloped and oppressed the man with its powerful, elastic muscles; it clasped itself to the chest of its mount with its two vast claws; and its fabulous head covered the man's brow, like one of those horrible helmets with which ancient warriors hoped to increase the terror of their enemy.

I questioned one of the men, and I asked him where they were going like that. He answered that he didn't know anything at all -- neither he nor the others; but that they were obviously going somewhere, for they were urged on by an invincible need to walk.

A curious thing to note: none of these travelers seemed irritated with the ferocious beast hanging from their neck and glued to their back; you might have said that they considered it to be a part of themselves. All of these fatigued and serious faces showed no evidence of despair; beneath the splenetic cupola of the sky, their feet plunged in the dust of a ground as desolate as the sky, they made their way with the resigned expression of those who are condemned to hope always.

And the train of men passed beside me and disappeared into mist of the horizon, at that place where the rounded surface of the planet conceals itself from the curiosity of the human gaze.

And for several instants I persisted in my desire to understand this mystery; but soon irresistible indifference battened upon me, and I was more heavily overwhelmed than they were themselves by their crushing Chimeras. -- [Translation by Cat Nilan © 1999] http://www.piranesia.net/baudelaire/spleen/06chimere.html [Jul 2006]

See also: Charles Baudelaire - chimera - Le Spleen de Paris (1869) - prose poetry


2006, July 05; 19:05 ::: Paris Spleen (1869) - Charles Baudelaire

In search of the sources of T. S. Eliot

Paris Spleen (1869) - Charles Baudelaire [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

[The] English-speaking poet who is unquestionably Baudelaire's most distinguished twentieth century follower [is] TS Eliot. Eliot first registered the impact of Les Fleurs du mal in 1907 or 1908; we can see the indirect but palpable reflection of this influence in the anti-aesthetic urban imagery of Prufrock (1919), with its celebrated opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — which one may well regard as a modernisation of certain lines in Baudelaire's Crépuscule du matin. --Baudelaire: Les Fleurs Du Mal (1992) - F. W. Leakey

Eliot had declared himself the new interpreter of Baudelaire “in our time”; he had drawn a direct line of descent from Baudelaire to himself, bypassing all the Victorians. --Eliot's Dark Angel (2001) - Ronald Schuchard, page 19

T.S. Eliot was the first modern American poet to read French poetry critically, seeking not to mimic its styles but to absorb its lessons in order to rejuvenate poetry in English. As a young poet Eliot was captivated by the opening lines of Charles Baudelaire's "Les Sept vieillards," in which ghosts swarm a city sidewalk and accost pedestrians in broad daylight: "Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,/Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant." "I knew what that meant," Eliot recalled in 1950, "because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account." From Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal Eliot learned how to transform the sordid streets of a modern metropolis into the stage of his own suffering. And from the little-known poet Jules Laforgue, Eliot learned how to create a confessional persona for that stage by amalgamating the voices of a mocking commentator and a droll sufferer. Impressions culled from the streets of Boston and London fill "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Preludes" and The Waste Land, but each poem's splenetic tone is French. --John Palattella, 2004 via http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20041227&s=palatella [Jul 2006]

See also: Charles Baudelaire - T. S. Eliot - 1869 - Le Spleen de Paris (1869) - poetry


2006, July 04; 19:05 ::: Gaspard De La Nuit (1842) - Aloysius Bertrand

In search of the sources of Baudelaire

Gaspard De La Nuit (1836|1842) - Aloysius Bertrand [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I went to the library and stumbled on Charles Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris's prose poems (I was at the "B" looking for Borges). In the introduction Baudelaire mentions he has read Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit at least twenty times before starting this work. [Jul 2006]

Here is a synopsis from the publisher of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit:

Synopsis
Gaspard de la Nuit (originally published in 1842) combines the haunting Gothic imagery of ETA Hoffmann with the colorful romantic verve of Victor Hugo. In it, you will meet Scarbo the vampire dwarf, Ondine, the faerie princess of the waters, and an unforgettable assortment of lepers, alchemists, beggars, swordsmen and ghosts. Gaspard de la Nuit inspired Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the Surrealist Movement and composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote a suite of virtuoso piano pieces patterned after it. This new edition has been entirely retranslated by renowned poet and literary historian Donald Sidney-Fryer, the author of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean who has edited four collections of prose and poetry by Clark Ashton Smith. In his extensive introduction and afterword, Sidney-Fryer retraces the steps in Bertrand's life, casts a new light on his works and follows the elusive Gaspard from the Three Kings of Bethlehem to Casper the Friendly Ghost. This collection features a foreword by T.E.D. Klein and is illustrated by drawings from Bertand himself. --from the publisher

And the Wikipedia article on Aloysius Bertrand:

Aloysius Bertrand
Aloysius Bertrand was the writing pseudonym of Louis-Jacques-Napoléon Bertrand (born April 20, 1807 in Ceva (Piedmont, Italy); died April 29, 1841 in Paris). He wrote a collection of poems entitled Gaspard de la Nuit which composer Maurice Ravel wrote a suite of the same name, based on the poems, "Scarbo", "Ondine", and "Le Gibet". He introduced the prose poem into French literature and inspired Symbolist poets.

He was born in Ceva, Piedmont, Italy and his family settled in Dijon in 1814. There he developed an interest in the Burgundian capital. His contributions to a local paper lead to recognition by Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. He lived in Paris shortly with little success. He returned to Dijon and continued writing for local newspapers. Gaspard was sold in 1836 but it wasn't published until 1842 after his death of tuberculosis. The book was rediscovered by Baudelaire and Mallarmé. It is now considered a classic of poetic and fantastic literature. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloysius_Bertrand [Jul 2006]

See also: symbolist literature - fantastic literature - 1842 - Le Spleen de Paris - prose poetry


2006, July 04; 19:05 ::: La Jetée (1962) - Chris Marker

In search of anti-film



Courtesy pas au-delà

La Jetée (1962) (literally "The Jetty" or "The Pier", but in this case idiomatically meaning "The Terminal," as in an airport terminal) is a black and white 28-minute science fiction film by Chris Marker.

It tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace with no dialogue and a limited narration consisting of a voice over. It contains only one single brief moving image.

Due to its brevity it often accompanies other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film it was first released with.

Terry Gilliam's 1995 film Twelve Monkeys was inspired by and loosely based on La Jetée. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%E9e [Jul 2006]

Non-Original Music by Trevor Duncan (stock music)

Movies have adapted movies (e.g. Twelve Monkeys deriving from La Jetée).

Flashback
A good example of both analepsis and prolepsis is the first scene of La Jetée. As we learn a few minutes later, what we are seeing in that scene is a flashback to the past, since the present of the film's diegesis is a time directly following World War III. However, as we learn at the very end of the film, that scene also doubles as a prolepsis, since the dying man the boy is seeing is, in fact, himself. In other words, he is proleptically seeing his own death. We thus have an analepsis and prolepsis in the very same scene. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_%28literary_technique%29 [Jul 2006]

In La Jetée (1962), the hero is haunted by a memory from his childhood, which turns out to be himself as an adult.

Time travel
A common theme in time travel movies is dealing with the paradoxical nature of travelling to the past. The film La Jetée (1962) has a self-fulfilling quality as the main character as a child witnesses the death of his future self. It famously inspired 12 Monkeys (1995). In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) the main character jumps backwards and forwards across his life, and ultimately accepts the inevitability of his final fate. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction_film [Jul 2006]

Predestination paradox
Another potential inspiration for the 1984 The Terminator is the well-regarded 1962 French film, La Jetée, a short black and white film by director Chris Marker. Told entirely in still images and narration, the film concerns a man in an underground post-nuclear future sent back into the pre-apocalyptic past to obtain resources necessary to continue humanity. The man is selected for his mission because his fixation on a memory from that period, in which he sees a beautiful woman and a man dying. The film concludes, as The Terminator does, with a predestination paradox; while in the past, the man falls in love with a woman who bears a striking resemblence to the woman in his memory, and then fulfils his own destiny by becoming the very man he witnessed dying, thus enabling him to travel back into the past. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator [Jul 2006]

Anatole Dauman
La Jetée was produced by Anatole Daumon's influential Argos Films.

See also: Anatole Dauman - anti-film - 1962 - photomontage - Chris Marker


2006, July 04; 19:05 ::: On avoiding popular music

In search of popular music

In a post titled why do i fight it? og of popyourfunk says:

been avoiding gnarls barkley, certain that i would not like it, based on dangermouse's involvement in the most unfortunate grey album. this morning, one of the local hip-hop stations exposed me to the single crazy. oh, what a fool i've been. guess i should read stereogum more often.

See also: popular music


2006, July 04; 19:05 ::: Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow

In search of popular music

Jagged Little Pill (1995) - Alanis Morissette [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Memory 1: driving to Willebroek with Wouter, hearing this on Studio Brussel, thinking, great song.

"You Oughta Know" is the title of Alanis Morissette's first single from her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill (30 million copies sold). It would end up as a number one song on Billboard's modern rock chart, while also charting at #4 in Australia. The song's lyrics describe Morissette's fouled relationship with an unnamed lover, introducing her harsh, angst-ridden lyrics to the public. Launching her career (and her Jagged Little Pill album) to the top, the coarse language, violent revenge scenarios and piercing vocals were a jolt to mainstream pop music. "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon has the same kind of mystery surrounding it. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Oughta_Know [Jul 2006]

Grâce à "You Oughta Know", Alanis Morissette est devenue la figure emblématique des filles en colère.

Thanks to "You Oughta Know", Alanis Morissette has become the emblematic figure of the angry girl.

Memory 2: maybe a week later, driving to I forget where, hearing this on the radio, thinking, great keys.

"All I Wanna Do" is a song perfomed by Sheryl Crow and written by Kevin Gilbert. It was Crow's breakout hit from her 1993 debut album Tuesday Night Music Club. The song was the 1995 Grammy Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_I_Wanna_Do_%28song%29 [Jul 2006]

See also: 1990s music - popular music - 1995


2006, July 04; 19:05 ::: Fairy tales in contemporary literature

John Bauer's illustration of trolls and a princess from a collection of Swedish fairy tales.

In contemporary literature, many authors have used the form of fairy tales for various reasons, such as examining the human condition from the simple framework a fairytale provides. Some authors seek to recreate a sense of the fantastic in a contemporary discourse. Sometimes, especially in children's literature, fairy tales are retold with a twist simply for comic effect, such as The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka. Other authors may have specific motives, such as multicultural or feminist reevaluations of predominantly Eurocentric masculine dominated fairy tales, implying critique of older narratives. The figure of the damsel in distress has been particularly attacked by many feminist critics. Examples of narrative reversal rejecting this figure include The Paperbag Princess, by Robert Munsch, a picture book aimed at children in which a princess rescues a prince, or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, which retells a number of fairytales from a female point of view.

Other notable figures who have employed fairy tales include A. S. Byatt, Jane Yolen, Terri Windling, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, Kate Bernheimer, Tanith Lee, James Thurber, Kelly Link, Robin McKinley, Donna Jo Napoli, Robert Bly, Gail Carson Levine and many others.

It may be hard to lay down the rule between fairy tales and fantasies that use fairy tale motifs, or even whole plots, but the distinction is commonly made, even within the works of a single author: George MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes are regarded as fantasies, while his "The Light Princess", "The Golden Key", and "The Wise Woman" are commonly called fairy tales.

Fairy tales are more than true -
not because they tell us dragons exist,
but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

G. K. Chesterton

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_tale#Contemporary_fairy_tales [Jul 2006]

See also: fantastic literature - literature of the 20th century - fairy tales - contemporary


2006, July 03; 19:05 ::: The reading experience

"Faulkner will continue to be Faulkner whether he’s read on slices of paper wedged between pieces of cardboard or on some now-unimagined variation of a “screen” in an e-book. Literary criticism will still be judged by the quality of its insights rather than the nature of the medium in which it appears.” – The Reading Experience via here

See also: information age - book - reading - the film experience


2006, July 03; 19:05 ::: Barth and his precursors

Certainly Barth had his own precursors. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," he cites Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett as the kind of technically adventurous writers whose company he would like to join, and, even further, praises Borges for his recogniton that no writer is truly original--such a writer would be unreadable, would make it so difficult for us to find our literary footing that the effort wouldn't finally be worth the trouble--but in effect is merely commenting on what's already been done. ("Pierre Menard," for example.) Thus Barth acknowledges that all literary writing is, in this broadest sense, generic writing. Moreover, Barth also confesses that he himself is a writer who "chooses to rebel along traditional lines," perhaps only inviting the charge that he's really not very innovative after all, merely imitative of his own favorite innovators--who themselves aren't really innovative, either, etc., etc. --Lost in the Funhouse by The Reading Experience.

John Barth's seminal essay "The Literature of Exhaustion” first appeared in the August 1967 Atlantic Monthly.

See also: Samuel Beckett - Nabokov - Jorge Luis Borges


2006, July 03; 19:05 ::: Fabulation

In search of hesitation and other genres in limbo

In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. They violate, in a variety of ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly successful—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, fantastic, mythical, and nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabulation

Recent fabulators

* Thomas Pynchon * John Barth * Donald Barthelme * William Gass * Robert Coover * Ishmael Reed

Robert E. Scholes is an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction and wrote the introduction to the English language edition of The Fantastic by Todorov--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scholes [Jul 2006]

See also: fantastic literature - postmodern literature


2006, July 03; 19:05 ::: Wanting connections, we found connections

Five Faces of Modernity (1977|1987) -- Page 301
by Matei Calinescu - Philosophy - 422 pages

Once Borges, Nabokov, and Beckett were seen as credible examples of postmodernist writing, the way to the internationalization of the concept was clearly open.

Today the international corpus of postmodernist writing includes, ... , but also Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Tom Stoppard, and DM Thomas (in Great Britain); Michel Butor, Alain

...Julio Cortàzar, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Cabrera Infante, and perhaps Manuel Puig (in Latin America); Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Botho Strauss (in Germany and Austria);

See also: connection - Samuel Beckett - Nabokov - Tom Stoppard - postmodern literature - Jorge Luis Borges


2006, July 02; 19:05 ::: Travesties (1974) - Tom Stoppard

In search of faction

Travesties (1974) - Tom Stoppard [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Travesties is a comedic play by Tom Stoppard, first produced at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on June 10, 1974, in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travesties [Jul 2006]

The play includes Tristan Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce as characters.

Travesties is a parody of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The play starts from the fact that Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and James Joyce were all in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1917 (in fact they were there at slightly different times, but Stoppard gets round this by telling the story through the memory of a confused old man, Henry Carr - hence also the facts getting mixed up with the plot of 'The Importance of Being Earnest', which Carr performed in at the time). There are clear relationships between Joyce's literary work and Tzara's dada art. The relation to Lenin's ideas is less well explained. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom Stoppard [Jul 2006]

At the same time that the Zürich Dadaists made noise and spectacle at the Cabaret Voltaire, Vladimir Lenin wrote his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment. He was unappreciative of the artistic revolutionary activity near him. Tom Stoppard used this coincidence as a premise for his play Travesties (1974), which includes Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce as characters. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada [Jul 2006]

See also: faction - travesty - theatre - Tristan Tzara - James Joyce - Lenin


2006, July 02; 19:05 ::: hugs from the honeys, pounds from the roughnecks.

In search of music.

Very nice MP3 blog here

See also: Electrifying Mojo


2006, July 01; 19:05 ::: Anti-poetry

In search of anti-art.

Hugo Ball (1886-1926) invented a form of anti-poetry in 1916:

"I have invented a new genre of poems, Verse ohne Worte, (poems without words) or Lautgedichte (sound poems), in which the balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence. I gave a reading of the first one of these poems this evening. I had made myself a special costume for it. My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk... I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor's hat."

--Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, edited by John Elderfield, translated by Ann Raimes (New York: The Viking Press, The Documents of the 20th Century Art, 1974 [1924]), p. 70.

via http://cotati.sjsu.edu/spoetry/folder6/ng65.html [Jul 2006]

See also: anti-art - poetry - sound art - Hugo Ball


2006, July 01; 19:05 ::: Ergodic Literature

In search of experimental literature.

Ergodic literature is literature that requires special effort to comprehend or read, perhaps due to a "non linear" structure. The term is derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning "work" and hodos, meaning "path". Ergodic literature demands an active role of the reader, such that they become "users" who may need to perform complex semiotic operations to construct the reading.

For example, ergodic literature may require following a very unconventional page layout in order to understand a novel, or in the case of ebooks, readers may need to constantly use hyperlinks to follow the narrative, or use menus to continue reading in a new location. By comparison, conventional "nonergodic" literature simply requires the reader to turn pages and follow the text in sequential order.

The term was coined by Espen Aarseth in his book Cybertext--Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Although it may be supposed that this kind of literature was born in the second half of the 20th century, at the same time as the first appearance of computers, critics of the ergodic literature have often mentioned the I Ching as the first example of genre. The text dates from the time of the Western Zhou Dynasty (1122-770 B.C.), and comprises sixty-four hexagram symbols which are binary combinations of six whole or broken changing lines (which also give the text its other name, the "Book of Changes"). A hexagram has a main text and six others, smaller than the main text, with one for each line. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature [Jul 2006]

Cybertext--Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) - Espen Aarseth [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Other examples

  • Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs, to greater or lesser extent composed using the cut-up technique
  • Composition No.1, a novel on cards written by Marc Saporta in 1961
  • Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel and Landscape Painted With Tea by Milorad Pavic
  • Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  • House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
  • Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Rayuela by Julio Cortazar
  • 253, both the print and online versions, by Geoff Ryman
  • The Dionaea House by Eric Heisserer
  • The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson
  • Other Electricities by Ander Monson
  • Ibid: A Life by Mark Dunn
  • Riddley Walker
  • City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature [Jul 2006]

See also: 1997 - interactive ficion - nonlinearity - experimental novel


2006, July 01; 19:05 ::: Jealousy (1957) - Alain Robbe-Grillet

The literary equivalent of a cubist painting.

Jealousy (1957) - Alain Robbe-Grillet [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Alain Robbe-Grillet's most acclaimed novel, Jealousy, is set on a banana plantation. Written in the first person, it tells the non-linear story of a husband's suspicion that his wife is having an affair. "Jalousie" can mean "window blind or shutter" and it is with the husband's eyes, through the jalousie, that we see the wife's lover.

His writing has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Robbe-Grillet [Jul 2006]

Grillet's novels are often translated by Christine Brooke-Rose.

See also: 1957 - Alain Robbe-Grillet - nouveau roman - experimental novel


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: The Libertine (2004) - Lawrence Dunmore

John Malkovich (right) in

The Libertine (2004) - Lawrence Dunmore [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I just finished watching The Libertine (2004) by Lawrence Dunmore starring Johnny Depp as John Wilmot (the 17th century equivalent of Lenny Bruce) and John Malkovich as king Charles II. I laughed, my jaw dropped earthwards several times and I wept. It is beautiful film and it makes you appreciate the beauty of playhouses (theatres) and the nature of acting in the age before the novel, film and television. I have seen both Depp (Pirates, Sleepy Hollow, Chocolate) and Malkovich (most recently in Time Regained after Proust, but before that there was Dangerous Liaisons) popping up in costume dramas and period pieces several times, just at a time when I'm getting into them. If you like this film you may also enjoy Russian Ark. 8/10. [Jun 2006]

See also: John Wilmot - theatre - The Libertine (2004) - Lawrence Dunmore


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: Antinovel

The term Antinovel was coined by French critic Jean-Paul Sartre. It refers to any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The antinovel usually fragments and distorts the experience of its characters, forcing the reader to construct the reality of the story from a disordered narrative.

The best-known anti-novelist is Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of Le voyeur. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinovel [Jun 2006]

See also: experimental literature - anti- - novel - nouveau roman


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: Anti-Story : An Anthology of Experimental Fiction (1971) - Philip Stevick

In search of postmodern novels

Anti-Story : An Anthology of Experimental Fiction (1971) - Philip Stevick [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

See also: anti- - story - experimental - literature


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: The Experimental Novel (1880) - Emile Zola

As the founder and most celebrated member of the naturalist movement, Zola published several treatises to explain his theories on art, including Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel). --http://www.fak09.uni-muenchen.de/Kunstgeschichte/projekte/zola/zolabiographie.html [Jun 2006]

"This is what constitutes the experimental novel: to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall give them to us, and then finally to exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation" (20-21). --Extracts from Émile Zola, "The Experimental Novel." Translated from the French by Belle M. Sherman. New York: Haskell House, 1964. via http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst337/Zola-ExpNovel.htm [Jun 2006]

An experimental novel is a novel that places great emphasis on style and technique. The first text generally cited in this category is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental novel [Jun 2006]

See also: 1880 - Emile Zola - realist literature - naturalism - experimental - novel


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: Experimental novel

An experimental novel can be defined as a work in which the author places great importance on innovations in style and technique. Experimental novels can be challenging to read because they represent reality in unusual ways, but they also demonstrate one of the novel’s greatest strengths—its ability to encompass an almost endless variety of approaches. Czech writer Milan Kundera asserted this idea when he argued that the novel is a constant questioning of forms.

One of the earliest examples of the novel of experimentation is Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) by English writer Laurence Sterne. --http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761560384_8/Novel.html [Jun 2006]

See also: style - technique - experimental - novel


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: Government funding of film

In search of the effects of state funding on film production.

For much of its history and in contrast to American cinema, European cinema has been funded by their national governments. How has this influenced European cinema?

But cinema production in Italy, Germany, France, Denmark, and Norway, all of which already had their own prosperous national cinema industries, was almost fatally interrupted by World War I (1914-1918), which brought European film production to a virtual halt. Unable to see the value of film production, either for propagandistic indoctrination or escapist entertainment, European governments ceased to support the production of indigenous films, and the American studios swept in to fill the gap. Indeed, the European cinema has never really recovered from this hiatus, which allowed the Hollywood studios to flood international markets with commercial genre films that soon became audience favorites, a pattern that persists to this day. --http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=23:61 [Jun 2006]

In Sweden, Ingmar Bergman began to direct a series of deeply personal films for Svensk Filmindustri, the state-owned film studio, which quickly became international art-house hits. Such classic Bergman films as Sommaren med Monika (1953; Summer with Monika), Sommarnattens leende (1955; Smiles of a Summer Night), and especially Det Sjunde inseglet (1957; The Seventh Seal) gained Bergman as the distinction of being a deeply individualistic director, who probed the depths of the human psyche. In addition, Bergman's works demonstrated that with state funded production, directors could make more personal and daring films that still appealed to audiences, unlike the Hollywood model, which was dominated from its inception by commercial considerations --http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=23:61 [Jun 2006]

See also: European cinema - arts funding


2006, June 30; 19:05 ::: George Harrison Marks (1926 - 1997)

George Harrison Marks (August 6, 1926 - June 27, 1997) was a British glamour photographer at the height of his productivity from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s.

With his then wife, the model and actress Pamela Green, he founded the Kamera group of magazines. Besides Pamela Green, his most popular models were probably June Palmer and Vicky Kennedy, who under her birth name of Margaret Nolan, went on to be an actress, in Carry On, Bond and other films, in the theatre and on TV, notably in Steptoe and Son. He also made a number of short films and the full length Naked - as Nature Intended.

He was the photographic consultant for the film Peeping Tom, which also featured Pamela Green in a cameo role. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Marks [Jun 2006]

http://www.npl-york.co.uk/kamera/index.htm

Solo glamour magazine Google gallery

See also: Pamela Green

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