August 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Holy Disobedience: On Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal By Patti Smith In the first stirring lines of The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet bares his youthful aspirations, his doctrine as a poet, and his tenets as a man. He offers a single sentence—“Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white”—then embarks on a paragraph of Proustian proportions, where straightaway the reader is hurled into the inner sanctum of the convict, privy to his gestures, sounds, and scents, his unspoken codes. We view the swagger of muscular gods, outfitted in the striped colors of a child’s party dress or a faded candy cane—colors most likely chosen to mock the wearers, the most hardened criminals of France. Yet Genet has imbued this mockery with grandeur; these are the colors of his chosen university, colors he believes he will one day wear on his own back, graduating from foundling to criminal to convict. Thus achieved, he will earn the privilege of joining his chosen comrades as they are transported by ship from the Breton port of Brest to the Salvation Islands, off the coast of a barely colonized French Guiana. He imagines himself among them, chained at the ankles, treading the muddied path to the prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where the most feared will be ferried across the piranha-infested Maroni River to rot in the hell of Devil’s Island. Read More
August 10, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Film Forum, Fallout Shelters, and Fermentation By The Paris Review If you recently found yourself wandering West Houston and Sixth, did you notice the soft sounds of film reels spinning and popcorn popping? If you didn’t, then you weren’t listening hard enough, because Film Forum is reopened for business after its renovation hiatus. Among some of the films stretching the legs of the new theaters are Nico, 1988 (which you can read about on the Daily) and a long schedule of films by the French director Jacques Becker. On Saturday night, I saw Rendezvous in July (Rendez-vous de juillet), a 1949 comedy of jazz-loving, Bohemian-lite young Parisians. Lucien is in love with Christine and wants to go abroad to make a documentary film; Roger is a brooding, brass-playing musician in love with the actress Therese, who will be starring alongside Christine in a hot new play. When these bright young things aren’t dancing in jazz clubs or having dinner parties, they’re navigating their lives away from the strictures of their bourgeois parents’ generation and forward into a new world after the war. At its heart, Rendezvous in July is a wonderful, quick-witted movie about young people, about Paris, about art and love. This was the first film I’d seen by Becker, and I hope to see another. However, if Rendezvous in July doesn’t pique your interest, I’m sure any of the embarrassment of film riches once more available would be reason enough to walk through Film Forum’s recently reopened doors. —Lauren Kane Read More
August 10, 2018 On Translation Translation, in Sickness and in Health By Lara Vergnaud Ramon Casas, Decadent Woman, 1899. Translation is a curious craft. You must capture the voice of an author writing in one language and bear it into another, yet leave faint trace that the transfer ever took place. (The translator extraordinaire Charlotte Mandell calls this transformation “Something Else but Still the Same.”) Though spared the anguish of writer’s block, the translator nonetheless has to confront the white page and fill it. The fear: being so immersed in the source text, adhering so closely to the source language, that the resulting prose is affected and awkward—or worse, unreadable. Yet immersion is inevitable. In fact, it’s required. Like the ghostwriter, the translator must slip on a second skin. Sometimes this transition is gentle, unobtrusive, without violence. But sometimes the settling in is abrupt, loud, and even disagreeable. For me, “plunge deep” tactics that go beyond the mechanics of translation help: coaxing out references to reconstruct the author’s cultural touchstones (books, film, music); reading passages aloud, first in the original and then in translation, until hoarseness sets in; animating the author’s story through my senses, using my nose, my ears, my eyes, and my fingers; devouring every clue to imprint the range of the author’s voice (humor, anger, grief, detachment) on my translation. Read More
August 9, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Violette Leduc By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Violette Leduc. In the summer of 1956, Violette Leduc, the autofiction pioneer and protegée of Simone de Beauvoir, began inpatient psychiatric treatment. She was forty-nine and suicidal. Her first two novels, L’asphyxie (translated as In the Prison of Her Skin) and L’affamée (The starving woman), both published in the late forties, were read and admired by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. “She is an extraordinary woman,” Genet would tell people. “She is crazy, ugly, cheap, and poor, but she has a lot of talent.” Albert Camus, who had accepted L’asphyxie for his series at Éditions Gallimard, likewise considered Leduc a brilliant writer. But critics were underwhelmed, and the public all but ignored her work. “I don’t think of myself as not understood,” she writes. “I think of myself as nonexistent.” In 1954, her third book, Ravages, which had taken six years to complete, was deemed too shocking to be published in its entirety. The male reading committee for Gallimard characterized the opening section, an autobiographical portrayal of the passionate romance between schoolgirls named Thérèse and Isabelle, as “enormously and specifically obscene” and liable to “call down the thunderbolts of the law.” Summarily excised, the section wouldn’t be published for another forty-five years. Yet Leduc’s dreamy, metaphor-burnished rendering of adolescent desire, which conveys as much emotional as physical sensation, is erotic but neither graphic nor coarse. “I was reciting my body upon hers,” Thérèse narrates, “bathing my belly in the lilies of her belly, finding my way inside a cloud. She skimmed my hips, she shot strange arrows.” It’s difficult to imagine such lines corrupting twentieth-century sensibilities any more than, say, Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour (published by Gallimard in 1928) or Genet’s gay classic Lady of the Flowers (published by Gallimard in 1951, albeit with some of the more pornographic scenes cut). As the novelist and Leduc champion Deborah Levy has said, the publisher’s prudishness seemed to rest on the fact that Leduc’s narrative is driven by the female libido—almost unique in literature then and hardly more commonplace today. Read More
August 9, 2018 First Person The Sad Boys of Sadcore By Kristi Coulter Peter Milton Walsh performing with his band the Apartments. “I liked my shirt a few hours ago, but now I feel bad about it,” Mark Eitzel said from the tiny stage at (Le) Poisson Rouge. He was smiling but not joking. He’d been forgetting lyrics and false starting songs throughout the set, and I thought the fringed shirt might be the last straw—that he might flee and vanish into Bleecker Street, just one more shuffling man in a porkpie. Powers engage, I said and then unconsciously assumed the position: wineglass down, torso tilted ten degrees forward, my entire body utterly still. I turned all the life in me toward making Eitzel know there was love in the room—that from time to time, we all lose a word, trip on a cord, put on a cowboy shirt and bolo tie that we truly have no business wearing. He got through the song, then another. Once the crisis point passed, my body downshifted, but it didn’t fully clock out until after the encore—then I slumped like a B-movie medium after a séance that had gotten out of hand. Propping up collapsing men is one of my talents. In a business meeting, I can produce boring data to bolster whatever shady-sounding claim the man next to me makes. If a guy asks, Am I ready to do this job / kiss this girl / give this speech? I can smile slightly and say, in a way that makes him think he believes in himself: I think you already know the answer to that question. I’m so good that I can even work remotely: via email, text, sext, DM, IM, marginalia, playlist, or windshield Post-its. But I’m at my best in the darkness of a club, twenty feet from the locus of disintegration. Read More
August 8, 2018 Look Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire By The Paris Review I always imagined that I would have a life very different than the one imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt in order to make that life. —Leonor Fini Admirers of the Argentine Italian artist Leonor Fini have included Andy Warhol, Madonna, Kim Kardashian West, and more recently Maria Grazia Chiuri, the head of the fashion house Dior, whose spring 2018 collection was dedicated to the artist. Multitalented and fearlessly forward-thinking, Fini refused to be categorized in any way, especially through gender norms. Although Fini exhibited in major surrealist surveys throughout the thirties and forties and counted Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí as friends, she rejected the movement’s traditional view of woman as muse. Her art explores the masculine and feminine, dominance and submission, eroticism and humor. Fini’s practice went beyond the medium of painting to embrace theater, ballet, the illustrated book, and costume. Rejecting social convention, Fini insisted that identity, like artistic expression, is never fixed—it must constantly be open to inspiration and imagination. The powerful self-portraits she produced throughout her long career present woman as warrior, sphinx, dominatrix, and feline goddess, mastering landscapes and lovers alike. The first American survey of her work, “Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930–1990,” will open September 28 at the Museum of Sex and run through March 4, 2019. A selection of Fini’s work appears below. Leonor Fini in Arcachon, 1940. Photo: unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Estate of Leonor Fini. Read More