Rabelais was the first French writer I read in old French, and it gave you the same feeling as watching speed chess being played in the underground cafés at six in the morning after a night out swilling plonk in the Left Bank. Rabelais led to Villon, and they both led to the troubadours and […]
It’s a forgotten fact that a sizable share of the voting population regularly consumed hallucinogenics from the late sixties until the early 80s, when physical nerve excitement gained the ascendancy. LSD, in crude terms, is voluntary insanity. It makes you go bipolar. Nobody knows precisely how many people took it, or for how long, or […]
I first landed on the old continent in 74, taking passage on the Dover-Ostend passenger ship. I stood on the docks in the pouring rain, pondering my next move with fifty English pounds to my name, then walked into a café with the sign Maes-Pils. A man waved me over to his end of the […]
In ’79, late August, I saw Milhoud for a routine checkup before I caught a ride out of town for New York and other points eastbound. Turned out something was wrong with me, and it had to be fixed. By the time I’d been through a second and a third operation I was somebody or […]
For twenty years, I hadn’t read a writer who’d caught my interest, so I survived on a meagre diet of Cendrars, Bukowski and Miller. Kerouac, Ginsberg and that ilk were looking more and more like conflated pussy-boys on a Sunday hike with every re-read, and the women….well, with all the women in the world worth […]
Artists can be incredible idiots when it comes to politics and Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский) was no exception. He was recruited on the Nevsky Prospekt by a self-styled revolutionary named Petrashevsky, but the Tsar’s secret police had been observing Petrashevsky for fourteen months. The entire circle of would-be revolutionaries was arrested and sentenced […]
The themes of Cendrars’ work resemble those of the floating world – vagabonding, travel, daily work of ordinary people, criminals and pilgrims all of which are used to evoke the contrary, i.e. the unascertainable, ephemeral world. Cendrars greatest con was convincing the world that he wasn’t mystical. But he was mystical in the grounded way […]
1455 – Dans une rixe au cloître de Saint-Benoît, il tue un prêtre nommé Philippe Chermoye ou Sermoise, et pour échapper aux conséquences de ce meurtre, il quitte Paris I fell across this passage at the age of 19, in the Groot Zal of the Katholiek Universiteit Leuven. The library was a safe haven if […]