beaN Sprouts

Almost exactly one year ago, I started reading M-E Nabe's book L'Homme qui arrêta d'écrire, if you remember.  

When we went to England and had the 2nd volcano incident which kept us there longer than we'd anticipated, I forgot to bring the book back, after only reading 155 of the 686 pages.

I got it back a few months ago, but by then I'd started and finished many other books.  I thought this would have a negative effect on my reading of the beginning of Nabe.  

When I started to read it two days ago, from page 155, I was surprised to find out I was still with the story, I still remembered what was going on when I'd last read that page, and the flavour or ambiance of the last scene I'd read was still present, fresh in my mind's heart.

Then I reached page 157, and a paragraph caught my attention so much that even now, ten pages later, I can't forget it and keep going back to it every now and then.

This doesn't happen all the time with me, so rillly, I must share.

Since it's in French...   I translated it.   It does not do justice to the original, but thankfully the ideas are more important here than the style -- even if that is an absurd thing to say about Nabe's work.  I hope he doesn't read this blog.  -smile-

Without further D.O.A.--

*****

"On a table, serving as a pedestal for the oeuvre, several dishes overflowing with food are exhibited.  The hiccup is that everything is rotten.  The strength of contemporary artists’ swindle is they adapt their vision of the world to their personal insufficiencies.  They replace the act they cannot accomplish with the position of no longer having to accomplish said act.  There are bits of cheese, of meat, and vegetables in bulk.  The artist waited for the lot to be in a state of advanced decay to present it to a public avid for novelty.  An event is always deemed superior to the thing itself.  Comments about an oeuvre’s standing allow one to avoid having to ask questions concerning its quality.  There is purée dripping from the table.  The act of exhibiting a piece exempts one from actually making an oeuvre.  They all find good reasons for not knowing how to create real eternal beauty.  The smell is pungent, especially the mushrooms climbing on the lump of terribly mature maroilles cheese.  It’s the metaphor about the guy who points at the moon with his finger.  In the old days, the imbecile was he who looked at the finger instead of at the moon, today, it is the one who looks at the moon.  The moon’s corny, modern is looking at the finger. Modern is exhibiting the finger.  Modern is giving the moon the finger."

MEN URGENT

I hate to interrupt the Rome trip but this is very important -- heh

I finally received Marc-Édouard Nabe's L'homme qui arrêta d'écrire, one of the books I mentioned in previous posts, and that I've been waiting for since 17 March, when I bought it on his website, the only way to get it. My order got um "lost" (but not the payment) Still...

The MEN experience started even before I began to devour his words.

It is a "different" book - no barcode! No editor/publisher on the cover, nothing on the back cover apart from the number 28 -- in pink!I love it.

This man is the first author in the world to own almost all the copyrights to his books- apparently he has managed to buy back 23 out of the (now) 28. By publishing this book himself, without an editor/publisher, he will need to sell fewer copies in order to get the same amount of money he would have done through "traditional" paths, selling far more. He (and all authors in France) get 10% of the price of the book, whereas bookshops get 30%. He financed it by selling his paintings (I don't know those very well...) and keeping it a total secret he was writing, given the book's title (The Man Who Quit Writing). He did write tracts and spread them all over Paris and Marseilles, stuck them to the walls, rogue style! Some of the tracts have since been translated and can be found on the website set up by his readers.

I love what he said in an interview when asked about editors and publishers in general.

He said the current "literary" system has only been in place for a hundred years or so; he went on to ask the interviewer: "can you imagine Hugo asking an editor if he thought it appropriate to cut the Waterloo scene, or whether Valjean should in fact do this or that..." No! I can't imagine it. But I had not thought of it this way before.

And it doesn't bother me that he put himself in the same category with Hugo. He's got the goods. Also...if everyone saw his predecessors as an impediment because of their greatness, what would get done? The Romans wouldn't have built much, after seeing the Pyramids.

Au régal des amateurs de littérature

Here's a book that's creating some controversy here, for several reasons.

The coolest of which, according to me, is that Marc-Édouard Nabe has completely circumvented the entire publishing Establishment- which has been boycotting him since the mid-80s - by financing his latest book entirely and selling it on his website.

Then there's the question of why he's been boycotted for such a long time, despite being arguably the greatest French writer alive. He says things that one doesn't often hear on television/radio. He writes things one doesn't often read anywhere. In short, he puts freedom of speech to (good) use, instead of rehashing the same tired postmodern/BernardHenriLévy-friendly school of thought that we're fed day in, day out.

I still haven't read this book because since it's gone on sale it has sold out within a month and I was not aware he'd released this book. I've ordered it but don't know when it'll be available.

I have read his tracts though, which he wrote and stuck to the walls all around the city, amazingly, and which are all available for free on the website set up by his readers.