You don’t really think of Agatha Christie as a sixties kind of bird, and yet she was certainly alive and writing in London when it was really swinging. Needless to say, like a lot of people, she didn’t get it, even when she thought she did, as these artfully arranged excerpts from 1966’s The Third Girl demonstrate:
His visitor was a girl of perhaps twenty-odd. Long straggles of hair of indeterminate color strayed over her shoulders. Her eyes, which were large, bore a vacant expressions and were of a greenish blue. She wore what were presumably the chosen clothes of her generation – black high leather boots, white open-work stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pull-over of heavy wool. Anyone of Poirot’s age and generation would have had only one desire – to drop the girl into a bath as soon as possible.
Silly girl. Goes about in dreadful clothes and has picked up with a dreadful young man. Ah, well, they’re all alike nowadays. Long-haired young fellows, beatniks, Beatles, all sorts of names they’ve got. I can’t keep up with them. Practically talk a foreign language.
They probably look like mods or rockers or beatniks or whatever they call these chaps nowadays with the long hair and the dirty nails. I’ve seen more than one of them prowling about. One doesn’t like to say, who the devil are you? You never know which sex they are, which is embarrassing. The place crawls with them.
"Would you like a cup of tea," he added, "or would you prefer a purple heart or a tranquilizer? That’s the kind of thing people of your age go for. Done a bit yourself in that line, haven’t you?"
She shook her head. "Not – not really."
"I don’t believe you. Well," he went on, "what are your tastes? Something out of my drug cupboard or a good solid old-fashioned English cup of tea? Right. Sit down there. Make yourself comfortable. Do you smoke?"
"Well, I–"
"Only reefers – something of that kind?"
The girl’s full of drugs. I’d say she’s been taking purple hearts, and dream bombs, and probably LSD. She’s been hopped up for some time.
It was the drugs that did it. Drugs that made her do things she would never have done of her own volition, and left her with no knowledge of having done them.
A rather interesting medley of drugs – LSD giving vivid dream sequences – nightmares or pleasurable. Hemp distorting the time factor, so that she might believe an experience has lasted an hour instead of a few minutes. And a good many other curious substances that I have no intention of letting any of you know about. Somebody who was clever with drugs played merry hell with that girl.
It was the kind of party where I wasn’t sure who the host was and didn’t particularly care. Maybe it was because we were ostensibly celebrating the end of spring vacation, but the atmosphere was pretty depressing – even the drugs were downers, a bowlful of Tuinal and Seconal somebody had brought back from a Mexican drugstore. In the oppressive atmosphere most of the guests seemed to have gravitated to the floor, lounging at the feet of the furniture or curling up under the tables, the smoke from their half forgotten cigarettes creating a haze above them as I walked through the house, a low ceilinged, dark beamed, single floored maze, done up Southwestern style, complete with horse blankets and saddles, tin cutouts gleaming dully from the walls.
There were plenty of kids from my school there, but not many other seniors, and for the first time in my life I felt old – awkward and obsolete, a dinosaur lumbering over all the quick, bright eyed mammals scurrying below, twitching with plans that didn’t include me. Soon, after the cataclysmic impact of graduation, this world would belong to them, and my kind would no longer be a part of it.
Once a serpent was seen stretched out next to the body of Olympias as she slept, and this, more than anything else, they say, abated the ardor of Philip’s passion for her. Accordingly, he no longer came often to sleep next to her, either because he feared some spells and charms might be put on him by her or thought that she had intercourse with some superior being. But there was another story about these matters: All the women in this region were addicted to Orphic rites and the orgies of Dionysus from extreme antiquity…Olympias, who affected these divine inspirations more enthusiastically than other women, and performed them in more barbaric fashion, would provide the revelers with large tame snakes which often would crawl out from the ivy and the mystic winnowing baskets and wind themselves around the wands and garlands of the women, thus terrifying the men.
– Plutarch
Oh, man, I’ve got to tell you…there’s a certain young lady author whose book I panned on the space not long ago – I won’t repeat her name because she is such a relentless self-Googler (tacky, tacky, tacky). To maintain that ever life affirming peevishness, I look at her website and pronouncements only too often. Lately she’s been webcamming herself at the local chain bookstore with a couple of her "writing" buddies to produce something she calls "Away From the Keyboard: The Writer’s Life Behind the Scenes." Sheeeeeeeesh…I mean here’s someone, although she did achieve that hallowed three book contract, who’s written one pretty darn lousy novel, and her partners, a somewhat older woman who is basically shopping books she hasn’t actually written and a college MFA type who really hasn’t written much of anything but pretty much means to, and yet this trio expects the world to lap up their giggled pronouncements as if they were Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald at the Ritz. The older woman shows her binder with query letter and carefully color coded sections for research and outlines, but admits she hasn’t produced any prose. The guy’s website (and of course he has a website about his writing life) has a fragment of his work, a little drip "between a play and a story," (that is to say not fleshed out enough to qualify as either) which might make the cut in a high school lit mag. But he has a little cap he wears while writing (or thinking about writing) that he can tuck his pen into so everyone in the coffee shop will know his sacred calling as he taps away on his laptop.
When did writing become such a public thing? To me it’s a private act, one that you necessarily do alone, something that there’s a little mystery about, yet in today’s anti-Romantic world, the most important part of writing is not the writing, or even the resulting work, but some kind of process that can be explained in a writing seminar, cobbled together in a writing group or performed in front of an audience, all of which produces a product that can successfully be marketed. Maybe it’s the WASP in me, but I also find it in poor taste to swan about calling yourself a writer before you’ve had anything published or even really written anything. My beloved Laura Lippman is surely entitled to have her own web page, expound on writing and promote her wonderful books in any way she sees fit, but (and O.K., there’s a little jealousy here) does she really have to call a certain fellow I also know slightly a member of the "young people movement in crime writing" when he hasn’t had anything published despite relentless networking? He too has his "writer’s" blog which includes, rather than a peep at his fiction, a copy of his query letter – which in today’s publishing world is the most important prose that can be produced.
The whole public quality of literature is a fairly recent thing – I mean authors had magazine articles and personas, but their actual books were the main thing people looked at. The relentless author touring, signing, appearances, radio and T.V. plugs, web pages, etc. cycle has developed over the last twenty-five years and has done nothing positive for literature. Neither has the mushrooming of MFA programs, writers workshops, and critique groups. My friend was just telling me how all these people were really pissed after Margaret Atwood’s seminar because she basically said that she couldn’t tell them how to write, the only way to learn to do it was to practice eight hours a day for a few years. But people don’t want to write – they want to be writers. I’ve been on the street level of the book biz for long enough to see, not only about a million people who wanted to write a book, a thousand who actually wrote one and a hundreds who got one published, but also fairly successful and good writers who disappeared after their three book contract was over because they didn’t produce a blockbuster. My webcamming legend in her own mind is very young and is to be congratulated for getting published by a major house, but her gigantic lack of perspective argues against her future productions improving. I’m sure in a decade or so she’ll realize that no one really cares about her table talk and what immense hubris she displayed in claiming that she knew anything about the writing life.
On this bed lies the Idol,
The sovereign queen of dreams
But how did she get here?
Who brought her?
What magic power set her on this
Throne of reverie and voluptuousness?
What difference does it make?
Here she is and I recognize her!
– Baudelaire
Well, UBU has had one busy (but profitable) week, children, so you’ll have to be content with an entry emptying out the old quotebag. I will say that, as I’ve written before, LAURA LIPPMAN’S new book What the Dead Know is the real deal, a great book, and that she herself is a wonderful, brilliant and very nice personage. I also note that the book is now already in the 6th printing, so if you can get a first of it UBU recommends you pick it up as an investment opportunity. But on to the received wisdom:
Here inbred careerists from the land of Lilliput take the high seat, while the giants are forced to jostle just to get inside the door.
It was as if their crazy relationship, or rather their amazing shared ride in her macabre old bed, had pushed him into a landscape where the old, familiar value scale was no longer applied. She made love for her life with a heat that exceeded all human behavior, as if life itself was the shared movement of their bodies.
– from The Cruel Stars of the Night by Kjell Eriksson
Klimt, after all, was preoccupied with one theme: the female, mysterious and even frightening, yet a perpetual source of exquisite delight.
Actually there was only one motif: the magic thrill a man experiences on seeing a female in the nude.
– from Gustav Klimt: 100 Drawings by Alfred Werner
Who called out many a secret oracular cry
To initiates on Eluesis’s shore
As she escorted the priest through
The Rharian field in Demeter’s honor
She is famous even in Hades
– Hermesianax
Crime Beat: Creative Weaponry: Part Two
Man says boss hit him at work site
A construction worker said his foreman struck with a work-site tool Wednesday on the seventh floor of the construction site at the Ross Business School, according to the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety.
The worker said his boss hit him in the groin with a concrete tamper machine – which is the size of a base-ball bat and is used to settle wet concrete – on Wednesday afternoon. The man said he continued to work, then reported the incident to police and sought treatment at a hospital in Lansing. The nature of the injuries was not known.
Shoplifter struck him, man says
A loss prevention employee at Sears said a suspected shoplifter repeatedly struck him in the head with a shopping bag as she struggled to escape, city police said.
The incident occurred April 9, but the 20-year-old Sears employee called police Monday to discuss the assault and said he wanted to press charges.
The 15-year-old girl and her sister were shopping in the store when a loss prevention officer noticed the girl enter the dressing room with several pairs of socks and emerge without them. She was carrying a shopping bag from another store.
The employee said the girl first said she would cooperate, then bolted. She and a store manager collided, knocking both to the floor. The girl then struck the loss prevention employee with her bag before additional security guards arrived to help.
The first time I picked up Rimbaud’s Illuminations as a teenager it blew my mind. I loved it, but still I couldn’t help wondering What is this? Where did this come from? As I got more context and read people like Baudelaire I understood more. But, as Lear says, nothing comes from nothing, so I then had to wonder where Paris Spleen came from. Even knowledgeable people like Edward Kaplan, editor of the great volume of Baudelaire’s prose poems called The Parisian Prowler, are quick to credit Charles with being the inventor of the prose poem, but he was just the first to coin the name. As is true for many things, the true innovator is unknown even today and died penniless and largely unpublished in his own time. His name is Aloysius Bertrand.
Thank god for library and garage sales, they’re almost a counter-academy, where the books people actually read and enjoy like Kerouac and Burroughs are more prized than the stuff they make you swallow in school like Henry James. Things will wash ashore there that have never found enough commercial success to be in new McBookstores or enough academic cachet to be required course work. There’s still a literary counter-tradition out there, a lot of it flowing up through Villon and the like into what we now know as rock and roll. Dylan and Patti Smith have spread the word about Rimbaud as much as anybody and I can just see them going through the books haphazardly piled in boxes next to me at the used book sales. I always look for the strange, the weird, the pornographic, the valueless and the priceless. Just a subtle difference of the type on the spine, or a title that wouldn’t cut it with Oprah is enough for me to give a volume a second look.
When I first saw Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit in the Black Coat Press edition it screamed out FANTASY to me, which is not exactly music to my ears, but when I read on the jacket copy that it had "inspired Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, the Surrealist Movement and composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote a suite of virtuoso piano pieces patterned after it" those same ears pricked up. It’s great when small presses, rather than playing the glorified vanity press game, unearth treasures from the past. I’ve been into Rimbaud and Surrealism since I was a teen and I’d never heard of Gaspard before that day.
I think because it was so very different for the 1840’s, Bertrand subtitled the book Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot and provided a very long framing preface, which help to obscure its originality. It’s not really descriptions of art work at all but the first set of prose poems, little vignettes of life in a romanticized Middle Ages, extremely subtle, learned and clever.
Baudelaire freely admitted that his own prose poems were the result of a failed attempt to imitate Bertrand, and that they only came to life when he transposed them to his own time. That’s his genius, of course, as he was one of the first to realize the poetry, beauty and dangerous, dirty and quite possibly evil magic of the modern metropolis. Rimbaud took it a step farther, making a symbol of his illumination, a hieroglyphic both modern and gothic, which could contain the past and the present, the real and the dream. Like a drug he allows us to see the same world in a different way.
Rather than the hipster or academic presses that bring us Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the English edition of Gaspard is, as my ever discerning eye realized, by an outfit that specializes in fantasy. I can see the attraction to the William Morris/Renaissance fair contingent of that motley band, but Gaspard is far from a Frodoesque gambol down precious twee paths, but a nostalgic desire for more romantic days in the dawn of the triumph of the bourgeoisie. There are sprites and monks, but they are seen through the grimy lens of those days, when such things were commonplace. It’s very fitting that the hermit genius of horror T.E.D. Klein supplies a foreward, as he is a poetic master making a slight distortion of the normal to produce an abnormal effect. Seeing that the odds of you being as lucky as I was to find it for fifty cents at a book sale are slim I would recommend going to www.blackcoatpress.com where it is still available. Kudos should also go to Donald Sidney-Fryer for his labor of love in its translation.
Gapard de la Nuit is not only valuable for its historical primacy, but is a sublimely realized work in its own right, as Bertrand’s contemporaries Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were quick to realize. In many ways Bertrand was an emblematic Romantic artist, ill-starred and just plain ill, a somewhat unearthly creature who died early of consumption and left just one exquisite work, a figure who is to be especially cherished now that the bell jar of Classicism is again sucking the air out of the world. He lacks the epigrammatic grandeur of Baudelaire or the heightened lyricism of Rimbaud, but the following will hopefully convey some of his subtle genius:
V. Evening on the Canal
Shores where Venice is queen of the sea
.
Andre Chenier.
The black gondola went gliding past the marble palaces, like a bravo hurrying forth to some nocturnal adventure, a stiletto and a lantern underneath his cape.
A cavalier and a lady aboard the gondola were speaking of love: "The orange trees are so heavenly sweet, and you are so indifferent! Ah! Signora, you are a statue in the garden!"
"This kiss, is it from a statue, my Georgio? Why do you sulk?" "You love me then?" "There is not a star in the sky that does not know, but you do not know?"
"What is that noise?" "Nothing, no doubt just the splashing of the waves rising and falling on some steps along the Giudecca."
"Help! Help!" "Ah, Mother of the Savior, someone is drowning!" "Move aside. He has confessed his sins," spoke a monk who came into sight on the terrace.
And the black gondola quickened its pace, gliding past the marble palaces, like a bravo returning from some nocturnal adventure, a stiletto and a lantern underneath his cape.
