#isidore ducasse

[majestativa]

Your mind is perpetually unhinged, lured into, and trapped inside the darknesses created by the crude art of egoism and amour-propre.

— Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Maldoror and Poems, transl by Paul Knight, (1988)

[atna2-34-75]

Man Ray

L’énigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920

Enigma II, 1935

[surrealistnyc]

Maldororian Poetry: A recent communiqué from Bruno Jacobs. And while on the topic, the London Review of Books ran a fascinating piece on the life and work of the French film-maker Sarah Maldoror, who while not a Surrealist took revolutionary inspiration from Isidore Ducasse in her work with African liberation movements from the late 1950s on.

[murakamijeva-muza]

“The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusion, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious & abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience , cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies,-odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devilfish, sharks, simoon of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomena of the aquarium, & the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camellias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness & scorning himself with joyous cries, that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin & their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin & Dumas fils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania,--before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us & bows us down.”― Lautréamont, Chants de Maldoror

[rjdent]

A stack of Maldorors.

The Songs of Maldoror by Le Comte de Lautreamont (English translation by R J Dent) published by Infinity Land Press.

[orpheusz]

(...) comme un angle à perte de vue de grues frileuses méditant beaucoup, qui, pendant l'hiver, vole puissamment à travers le silence, toutes voiles tendues, vers un point déterminé de l'horizon, d'où tout à coup part un vent étrange et fort, précurseur de la tempête. (...)

[spectaculardistractions]

From Georges Sadoul Paris, 14 May 1953 My dear Luis, I don’t know if you’ve been told about the muted response your latest film, This Strange Passion, received at Cannes. I’m sure you will know that some press announcements implied you would attend the Festival to present the film to the public. I certainly thought you would be there and was expecting you, so I was enormously disappointed. The Jury, as you know, was chaired by Jean Cocteau. He saw the film before the public. And before the screening he kept saying, in so many words: ‘I’ve witnessed a suicide. Buñuel wrote saying he cared greatly (or somewhat) for This Strange Passion. But all I can see is a regrettable, commercial film. Shocking.’ I do think, in fact, that he was expressing his sincere opinion and was not motivated by any ill-will. Just as a Bordeaux wine loses its bitterness over time, with age, Cocteau has become a model of benevolence and indulgence. In general, he has been an excellent president of the Cannes’ Jury. Except in the case of This Strange Passion. Of course, his comments were reproduced, and a number of critics absented themselves from the Festival on the afternoon the film was screened, because the Mexican gala evening had been set aside for La red, that far-fetched, vulgar fabrication by Emilio Fernández. The absences were even more noticeable because Susana had been screened six months ago in Paris, with a lot of publicity around your name, and the critics hadn’t much appreciated a film that I, personally, enjoyed (unless I’m mistaken?) as a commercial product in that zarzuela style you worked in, pseudonymously, some years ago in Madrid. Although I certainly didn’t recognize ‘my Buñuel’, except in one or two images. Before This Strange Passion, they screened a horrible, chauvinistic French film called Vie passionée de Clémenceau, the Ministry of War had ‘packed the house’ with a hundred or so veterans from 1914 to 1918, whose job it was to applaud, loudly, all the vengeful statements, shots of Marshall Foch, and battle scenes. This select audience stayed on to watch your film. So, it was hardly surprising that certain sequences were met with shouts and whistles, just as in the days of The Golden Age. As for me, I barely heard the shouts and whistles. I was ‘captivated’ from the opening scenes. Transported twenty years back to our youth. Where Cocteau saw a banal commercial film, I saw extraordinary fidelity to the motifs of The Golden Age and the rage of an acerbic and destructive humour that destroys, with Arturo de Córdova, all the commercialism of Mexican cinema, attacking it with its own weapons. But what most excited me was the fact that the recuperation (often forcefully highlighted) of the motifs of The Golden Age went hand-in-hand with their critique. The abject monster of This Strange Passion seemed to me the image, the double, the brother of the hero embodied by Modot, but reviled, destroyed, torn to shreds, rather than, as in The Golden Age exalted, glorified and placed on a pedestal. Francisco the sanctimonious, perverse, feudal, the unjust tyrant, both in the bell tower scene and in the encounter with his servant, seemed to me to be turned by your vision into an unprecedented condemnation of all the new incarnations of Fantômas or of Maldoror, who tormented some of us in the days of surrealism. To use an (overly solemn) analogy, if The Golden Age was your Maldoror, I see This Strange Passion as your Poésies by Isidore Ducasse. I said all of this (or something similar) in Cannes where, with the exception of five or six critics, This Strange Passion was condemned for a surface meaning so poorly understood it might have taken first prize at Catholic central for its ‘perfectly edifying’ denouement. And so it went on. 48 hours later, André Bazin, who initially shared the general incomprehension, published a defence of your film in the Festival bulletin, Rendez-vous de Cannes, published by Cinématographie française. Cocteau was no longer quite so insistent about his earlier opinion, although when I said: ‘It is The Golden Age’ his answer was ‘No, it’s The Monetary Age’ (with malice, this time, doubled or tripled). I am, though, convinced that if This Strange Passion is screened in Paris, it will definitely attract fans and lengthy eulogies in journals like Cahiers du cinéma. That said, I think your film will be difficult to defend, because it will be misunderstood by mass audiences (of whatever kind) who will only see (at best) its sadism, rather than its critique of sadism. Your intentions (or at least those I attribute to you) will be understood by a hundred initiates at most, that is, by men of our generation and experience, or the subtle aesthetes of Saint Germain des Prés. And to repeat a slogan from The Golden Age, ‘poetry should be written by everyone’ (in other words, for everyone), beginning with cinema. I shall try to explain your film when it premieres in Paris. I doubt these explanations will succeed in convincing anyone beyond a small (and reprehensible) circle of initiates… And now for a change of topic. I’m negotiating with Fondo de Cultura Económica and Arnaldo Orfilo Reynal a Mexican edition of my new book La Vie Charlot (I sent you a copy in November, did you get it?). However, the editors, who published my little book El cine and have just issued a new edition, are not offering very favourable terms. Do you know of any Mexican publisher who might be interested? A serious publishing house, of course, that would be undeterred by competition from Francisco Pina’s Charles Chaplin (and prepared to produce an initial run of 1,000 copies)? I would be very grateful if you could write back to me about this soon. And I would also like you to tell me about This Strange Passion, and whether I was correct in the intentions I attribute to you. But that can wait for another letter. When, finally, will you return to France? What does your Robinson Crusoe mean for you? We spoke of you at great length yesterday with Dominique Éluard and Eli Lotar. Most cordially, Georges Sadoul

Jo Evans & Breixo Viejo, Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters

[garadinervi]

Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont), Préface aun livre futur, Editions de la Sirène, Paris, 1922

[nununiverse]

Hans Bellmer  LAUTRÉAMONT, comte de (pseud. de Isidore DUCASSE 1846-1870). Les Chants de Maldoror. Gravures Christie’s

[majestativa]

The unexpected, the forbidden, the mysterious, vulture-like [...] peculiarities.

— Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Maldoror and Poems, transl by Paul Knight, (1988)

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

La mia poesia consisterà soltanto nell'attaccare con ogni mezzo l'uomo, questa bestia feroce, e il Creatore, che non avrebbe dovuto generare gentaglia simile. I volumi si ammucchieranno sui volumi, fino alla fine della mia vita, eppure in essi si vedrà soltanto quest'idea, sempre presente alla mia coscienza!

Isidore Lautréamont Ducasse, Tr. Lanfranco Binni, I canti di Maldoror, Poesie, Lettere.

[surrealistnyc]

Henri Béhar's new study Lumières sur Maldoror explores the uses Berton, Soupault, Aragon, and Tzara made of Isidore Ducasse's work in their own poetry.

[rjdent]

Le Comte de Lautréamont's The Songs of Maldoror (translated into modern English by R J Dent) was published one year ago today by Infinity Land Press.

[blakegopnik]

THE FRIDAY PIC is a 1977 shot (two, actually) by Alen MacWeeney, from the exhibition of his subway photos now at the New York Public Library. I published a few words about his show in today's New York Times (text is below), but there was one detail, or question, I didn't have room to discuss: Is the figure at right, in the white coat and hat, possibly cross-dressed or transgendered? If so, there's a fascinating parallel between the collision of two codes implied in that figure and the collision of two images that is at stake in all the subway works by MacWeeney, which, as I explained in the Times, are in fact secret diptychs.

Here's my Times review:

Has there been another exhibition whose venue so perfectly suits its art? In one of the slender halls on the third floor of the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue headquarters, a civic landmark, hang photos shot in the slender cars of the New York subway, another symbol of the city. Walk down the hall at N.Y.P.L., and you might be on a platform looking into a stopped train: In one car, a weary-looking straphanger scowls while a rider in a head scarf and coat looks beatific; in another, a young woman ogles a dandy.

The Irish photographer Alen MacWeeney, 84, took these 44 photos in 1977 after arriving in Manhattan to work for Richard Avedon. They nod to the subway shots of Walker Evans from four decades earlier, with one major difference: In most of them, MacWeeney cleverly enlarges two subway shots onto one sheet of photo paper; with no seam between them, they register as a continuous scene. That gives each print a subtle surrealism, as we absorb the breach in space and time across its two photos without recognizing that they began life separately: A woman rests her eyes in a car that, thanks to MacWeeney, appears to have expanded into a maze of graffitied walls; another car seems to show its inside and outside at once, like a Möbius strip.

“The chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” — that phrase by Isidore Lucien Ducasse is supposed to capture surrealism’s signature weirdness. But what about the encounter of an umbrella with another moment in its own existence? That’s the more peculiar strangeness we find in MacWeeney’s subway.