Hello again!
So, the other day, I finished my read-thru / proofread of fellow Shabby pressmate
’s book Log Off (also coming out June 4th, same day as mine).I’d made my way through the first half in a sort of stop-and-start manner, which had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with my being worried about other stuff (getting down the final formatting / backcover / etc. details on my own book, worrying about how my job is being taken over by a (frankly dumber than me) AI bot, and fretting over my damn birthday, which just happened, and which I already wrote a whole damn book about fretting over, but suppose I am still not over doing).
Then, on Saturday, I blazed through the last 150 pages over the course of one long sunny afternoon. It was great. I love this book!! One word I’d use to describe it - which is rarely a word that I think applies to the kinds of books I tend to like - is that it’s very… realistic? As in, it felt very true to the experience of being a teen in the early aughts (the book is written as a series of LiveJournal entries and narrated by a 16-year-old growing up around Y2K). It is also quite frequently laugh-out-loud funny – I got some stares when reading it on the metro.
It also has a character named Christopher, who is a sort of top of the class, somewhat floral/formal-talking, flamboyant Oscar-Wilde-reading type, who enjoys to say things like, “Do you think Plato sat his parents down and came out to them? I guarantee you he did not. He simply lived. What about Proust? You think he came out to his chère mère after she gave him a kiss goodnight?” and talking about how he wishes he could attend a Southern debutante ball.
This is exactly the kind of shit I would’ve said in high school, and so, naturally, I am completely obsessed with him. Absent the good grades, he is so moi.
Also, as a side note, I read this book in a pretty iconic location, which is the terrace of the apartment I am currently renting by the beach in the Cadiz region of Spain. It was windy (it often is) but warm and in the morning I’d gone out for a long run & swim then had a big fat late lunch and spent the afternoon lounging around, drinking coffee, ignoring my phone, and just reading. I love days like this. I wish I had more of them.
There are few books I’ve read for which the actual experience of reading I can recall on command because the location was particular and the combination of this and the actual book allowed me to enter that dreamy “expansive” zone you get into I think basically only from reading (?). The ones that immediately come to mind are The Duino Elegies - which I read in a top floor room with a skylight and red tile roof I would sometimes go sit out on to read, in Prague, when I was about 20 - and Infinite Jest, which I read at a similar age, on the balcony of a room I subletted for one month in September 2011 or '12, in Northampton, Massachussetts. The balcony looked over one of the main streets and as I remember it I sat there for basically the whole month reading, and sometimes a friend would walk by and wave at me and invite me out to this that or the other thing and I would smile and say no thanks I’m busy. Anyway, it is my pleasure to now add Log Off to this rather select list - and thank you Kristen for allowing me to re-enter The Expansive Literary Zone.
Alright, on to what this email was initially supposed to be about: Dead French Poets.
I was in Paris recently to help my parents move and then run the marathon there. I discovered, near their house, which is tucked away far on the outskirts of the city near a whole bunch of sports stadiums, to my surprise & bemusement, something called the Square des Poètes. It really isn’t what you’d expect to find tucked between a couple highways, a rugby stadium, and some big sketchy woods, but there you have it. It’s full of flowers over plaques written with the names of various (mostly) French poets and often a quote from some of their stuff. Frankly, I think it’s pretty neat.
Here are some highlights. At the entrance one is greeted by Robert Desnos, a cool Surrealist (but sort of fringe, I feel like?), with whom I think there is something about predicting either his own death or at least the loss of his eye or something? in a poem written during one of those ‘automatic writing’ exercises they were into. He was also in the resistance in WWII and was deported to a camp, where he died.
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(In my dayjob I’m a translator… and yes, I’m open for business, lol.)
Next, we have François Villon around the corner. Villon lived in the 15th century, and he seems to have been, what one might term, a badass & an absolute legend. I don’t recall learning about him in school, which I feel supports this point. He’s sort of the OG wandering rascal poet. He was likely the ringleader of a ‘gang of student-robbers’ who wandered then stole ‘100 gold crowns’ from the coffers of Paris University and then was banished (for the second time - the first having had to do with a dagger skirmish gone awry - though not the last) from Paris and became a vagabond. The banishments were both pardoned, then he was again arrested in Paris for theft a few years later, pardoned again, released, “fell promptly into a street quarrel,” re-arrested, and this time sentenced to be hanged. It is likely during this time - I imagine - that he wrote the famous Ballad of the Hanged – a real classic, imo. He wasn’t hanged, in the end, though, but simply banished from Paris once more, at which point history loses track of him, and what ultimately became of him is unknown.
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Next, there was Jean Cocteau. I feel like I don’t know as much about him as maybe I should do, because I feel like he was cool. And, you know, gay and stuff. I remember watching that black & white version of Beauty and the Beast (he was also a filmmaker) he did and finding it pretty but also tbh kinda boring. Maybe I should check out some other movies like Blood of a Poet? Or perchance a book? Recommendations welcome…
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Next, we came across good ol’ Verlaine. It feels kind of hard to get on board with Verlaine these days, mostly due to his whole having been a whiny alcoholic domestic abuser thing. That said, he did date Rimbaud, so he must’ve had something going for him, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy fancying the lads in the late 19th century, so, idk. OK, I’ve just googled some of his poems for a refresher, and it’s true, some of them are pretty… pretty. But nowhere near as near as memorable as his bf’s, IMHO!
(Also, I think one of the stylistic innovations he is remembered for is that he made “odd-numbered” verses cool (he’s got an Ars Poetica poem that goes: “Music above all else / And prefer odd-numbers / Vaguer and more soluble in the air / With nothing in it that’s weighty or sets down”), which probably helped other people (such as Rimbaud) move towards prose poetry / free verse. But also, seeing as The Island is written entirely in odd-numbered verse, since it’s a “haiku” in 5/7/5s, maybe we’ve got him to thank at least a lil’ bit for that.)
(Every time I talk about meter I feel it sends the pretentiousness-o-meter of this substack through the roof… o well.)
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Finally, for a bit of goss, we have Rimbaud’s secret other post-Verlaine rebound boyfriend, Germain Nouveau. I don’t really know the first thing about this guy’s poetry, tbh, and I don’t think that many people do, which is sort of why I was surprised to run into him in the Square. He’s mostly remembered as a minor Symbolist poet, I think, but I believe he was given manuscripts of A Season in Hell & maybe the Illuminations by Rimbaud (before he ran off to Africa forever) whilst Verlaine was busy being imprisoned for sodomy after drunkenly shooting Rimbaud in the wrist (which led to the police being called), and I think the fact that Germain Nouveau hung on to at least the former manuscript is perhaps the sole reason why we have still have it today? Well, that and Verlaine promoting it a whole bunch afterwards. Anyway, apparently some of the Surrealists insisted he was “not a minor poet but a great one!!” - so maybe he is worth checking out, too.
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Speaking of all this, I was excited to see today that Inpatient Press is releasing “The Spiritual Hunt,” a poem attributed to Rimbaud and said to be his last lost secret “key-to-all-the-rest” one. I think it is in fact almost certainly a hoax by a couple pranksters from the mid 20th-century, but whatever, it’s the first translation of the text into English, I think, and that seems pretty cool to me and frankly I wish I’d done it myself! Here’s a link.
Alright, thank you for joining me for Dead French Poets 101. I recommend the Square if you’re ever in Paris for a soccer or rugby match and want to pop by. Plus, it’s across the street from this absolute stunner of a building:
And, in closing, because that was a whole lotta old dead white dudes, here’s a love letter allegedly written by the Romantic writer George Sand to Alfred de Musset (although it is variously said to have been written to Chopin or some other guy, too – and is also very likely another forgery / hoax, this one from the late 19th century, as no original handwritten version seems to exist). I translated it for the enjoyment of Lucy’s zine club attendees as part of the session they did on epistolary writing:
The thing about this letter is that it’s coded. Simply read from start to finish, it’s a regular-ass melodramatic Romantic yearning letter, but if you start on the first line and then skip a line each time, a much funner & hornier version emerges. So… enjoy!
(Here’s a link to the ‘original’ in case you think I’m making this all up for some reason.)
And if that’s still a bit old and dead and white for your liking, well, you can always pre-order Kristen’s book for something with a bit more contemporary flavor. In the meantime, however, I think it’s time for me to… Log Off. ;p