Alfred Jarry – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 90

Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez (1957) by Remedios Varo (1908–1963) some of whose Surrealist paintings can be seen at Frey Norris, San Francisco, from 19th January. There’s also In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 29th January.

The current crop of Republicans jostling for the Presidential nomination have reminded me of the Downunder people in Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalypse novella A Boy and His Dog (1969): a retrograde, fear-ridden community who send troublesome individuals to be exterminated at “the farm”. Rick Santorum (unforgettably pictured here with family in 2006 after losing an election) almost received the majority of Iowa’s votes for his nomination last week, prompting renewed scrutiny of his negative views about gay people, sexually active people, foreign people (especially Arabs and Mexicans), and anyone generally who isn’t a white, Catholic, Downunder person. Santorum is against gay marriage, of course—it’s hard to find a Republican who isn’t—but he also wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and given the opportunity would allow US states to prevent any use of contraception. Add to this his pro-torture stance (which offends current Catholic church policy), and his willingness to wage war with Iran, and it’s easy to see why his name prompts reactions such as this:

I have a history with Rick Santorum. In 2003, when Santorum, in an interview with the Associated Press, first compared gay relationships to child rape and dog fucking (have I mentioned that Santorum has compared gay relationships to child rape and dog fucking?), I held a contest to redefine Santorum‘s last name. The winning definition: “the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” (“Sometimes” is the most important word in the new definition of santorum; if you’re doing anal sex correctly, there won’t be any santorum – lower- or upper-case.) And since 2003, the new definition has been the No. 1 Google return when you search “santorum“.

Rick Santorum’s homophobic frothing by Dan Savage

Related: Santorum was named one of the three “most corrupt” Senators in 2006 | “Homohater fosser fram” which is how Dagbladet, Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper, introduces Santorum to its readers | “Rick Santorum channels Saint Augustine” an article at Slate exploring the Handmaid’s Tale extent of Santorum‘s attitudes towards sex and morality | Rick Santorum quotes as New Yorker cartoons.

The Rod (1973) by Brigid Marlin.

• Ballardian posts a long-overdue interview with Brigid Marlin, famous now for having brought two lost Paul Delvaux paintings back to life for JG Ballard, but also a woman with an extensive career as a fantastic artist using Ernst Fuchs‘s laborious mische painting technique.

• Quentin Blake on Ronald Searle, in which Blake notes that his hero was given a full-scale exhibition of his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, France, in 1973 whilst being ignored throughout his life by the major institutions in Britain.

• Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie is reviewed by Michael Moorcock who tells me the Guardian cut out his references to Boris Vian, Maurice Richardson and David Britton.

• Ian McKellen stirs things up by suggesting (not for the first time) that Shakespeare was bisexual.

• Ten posters by Only More Never Less inspired by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

• An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate.

• Peace Eye! Fug! A Long Talk With Ed Sanders.

• Sand sculptures by Carl Jara.

• Letterheady

• Skylab: These Are The Blues (1995) | Beyond The Breeze (1995) | Red Light, Blue Light (1995) | Indigo (Sabres of Paradise remix, 1995) | Seashell (Nobukazu Takemura mix, 1995).

Weekend links 89

A drawing from Bestiario Moderno by Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970).

RIP Russell Hoban. Nina Allan celebrates a favourite writer while David Mitchell, writing in 2005, pays tribute to Riddley Walker. For me the gulf between Hoban and many of his contemporaries could be measured by his entry in the Writer’s Rooms feature the Guardian Review was running for a couple of years: Hoban’s room was the only one that admitted to being cramped and chaotic.

A wristwatch could be “a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air” and still tell time. A short story could take the shape of an instruction manual for the most routine of tasks (crying, singing, winding said dungeon, killing ants in Rome), or a compendium of tales about fantastical but oddly familiar species. A novel didn’t have to progress from the first page to the last, hung on a rigid skeleton of plot: it could proceed in oblong leaps and great steps backward, like a game, say, of hopscotch. “Literature is a form of play,” said Cortázar. […] It is perhaps because he so stubbornly resists categorization, as much as for the ludic complexity of his work, that Cortázar is in these parts more admired than he is read. The Anglophone literary imagination (or perhaps just its material substrate: the market) appears to have room for only one Latin American giant per generation—Borges, García Márquez, the freshly beatified San Bolaño. Cortázar was too weird, too difficult, too joyously slippery to make the cut.

Eels Über Alles: Ben Ehrenreich on Julio Cortázar

• Alfred Jarry is another writer the Anglophone world has often found “too weird, too difficult”. Jarry has been dead for over a century but Alastair Brotchie’s recently-published full-length biography is the first such work in English. Mark Polizzotti reviews a life of “the poster boy for literary cult figures” at Bookforum.

• “A Beautiful Trip”: Frances Morgan interviews David Lynch about music and sound. And Robert Wyatt talks for 95 minutes to Tony Herrington about his favourite music.

• Twilight Science: Paul Schütze presents solo musical work and various collaborative projects in new digital editions.

Jonathan Barnbrook‘s logo design for Occupy London.

• Winter reads: Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green. Related: What became of illustrations in fiction?

• The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen is a new Penguin Classic out in January.

• “This Christmas, why not give Viriconium, city of sex, syphillis & consubstantiation?”

• The Casual Optimist announces its Favourite Book Covers of 2011.

• The Collect Call of Cthulhu

• Living with Burroughs

• Function (2011) by Emptyset | Aftertime (2011) by Roly Porter with Cynthia Miller on the Ondes Martenot.

Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi

Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry.

Now here’s a marriage made in heaven (or hell, depending on your point of view): Pere Ubu plus the Brothers Quay presenting Alfred Jarry’s 1896 classic of proto-surrealist theatre, Ubu Roi. I hope someone’s filming this given that there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to get down there to see it. Pere Ubu’s David Thomas has this to say about collaborations:

Well, it’s pretty simple. If someone wants to work with me then they have the right stuff. Working with me is guaranteed career endangerment, not to be undertaken lightly. I had no idea of who the Quays were. Everybody else seems to know but I don’t watch films, tv or video unless a space ship or baseball is involved. The Quays don’t involve themselves with either. So how am I supposed to know? I don’t make the Rules. I obey. We met. We talked. We immediately understood each other and the project and how it all would fit together. I don’t trust visual information of any kind. The Quays were clearly men who were capable of taming the Eye Beast. I told them I’d be delighted to stay out of their way and let them get on with doing what they feel most. They sent me pictures. They were, as I knew they must be, perfect. No space ships. Or baseball. But perfect nevertheless. Only people who don’t understand need to talk. We have no need of talking. Talking is for the weak, the uncertain… and girls. Ha-ha! (I mean it.) We are men who stand in the moment and can deliver the goods. So down to the process: Only work with people who are Masters, and who Understand. If you choose to work with such people then don’t get in their way unless they appear to be set on a course that will break The Rules. Don’t make up the Rules. Don’t work with people who feel the need to talk to you. Don’t work with children or animals. Don’t run into the furniture.

Details from the press release follow and I feel the need to make a point of order: the famous first word of the play, “Merdre!”, doesn’t mean “shitter” as mentioned below. Rather, it’s an untranslatable combination of the French words for “shit” and “murder” which Cyril Connolly rendered unsatisfactorily as “Pschitt!” in his 1968 translation with Simon Watson Taylor.

Pere Ubu and the Brothers Quay present the WORLD PREMIERE of Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi

In two specially created performances for Southbank Centre’s ETHER 08 festival, expressionist avant-garage band Pere Ubu presents the world premiere of Bring Me The Head of Ubu Roi, an adaptation of Ubu Roi (King Ubu), Alfred Jarry’s landmark 1896 play that inspired the band’s name and is widely seen as the precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist art movements.

At the heart of Jarry’s original production was the use of various performance media, and Pere Ubu’s show reflects this with a unique visual staging by the enigmatic Brothers Quay, featuring intriguing stop-motion animation, projections and imaginative stage designs. Singer David Thomas will feature as Père Ubu, partnering Sarah-Jane Morris (ex-Communards) in the role of Mère Ubu, and the production includes an original music score by the band Pere Ubu and 10 new songs. Gagarin, aka London-based former Ludus, Nico and John Cale drummer Graham Dowdall, will contribute minimal electronic soundscapes.

The Brothers Quay.

With this part music, part spoken word, part animated production on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, David Thomas of Pere Ubu realises a dream he has had since being turned on to Alfred Jarry as a 16-year-old high school student in Cleveland, Ohio.

David Thomas said: “Jarry’s ideas resonated with feelings I had about the use of abstract, concrete and synthesised sound in the narrative architecture of rock music, all tools to engage the imagination of the listener when detailing the picture told by the music and lyrics.”

David Thomas.

Ubu Roi is a play for the mind and imagination. It is a drama of ideas and grotesqueries, and a fusion of several disparate and incongruous elements. It shocked early audiences with its blend of grotesque absurdity, wild humour and coarse language. At the premiere in 1896, the very first word of Ubu Roi (‘merdre’, translated as ‘shitter’) provoked a riot amongst the audience and fist fights broke out in the orchestra. Alfred Jarry’s plays in general were widely and wildly hated for their vulgarity, brutality, low comedy and complete lack of literary finish, and his work revealed a lack of respect for royalty, religion and society that prompted some to see his output as the theatrical equivalent of an anarchist bomb attack and an act of political subversion.

~~Alfred Jarry~~ with his weapons and bicycles, somewhere in the 1890s. (No it ain’t; see the comments.)

Prior to the Friday performance, there’s a free event in the Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, entitled ‘Pataphysics in Sound. This specially curated musical journey through the history of ’pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, celebrates the genius of Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu Roi and literary madman, time-travelling, absinthe-drinking, pistol-toting, and cycling maniac.

Bring Me The Head of Ubu Roi is presented at the Southbank Centre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Thursday 24 and Friday 25 April 2008.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• Surrealist cartomancy