Two recent articles by me, written for 3:AM Magazine: a review of Tom McDonough’s new Situationist reader, and an interview with Eric Hazan, radical publisher and author of The Invention of Paris.
Archive for the ‘France’ Category
Strolling Through Faubourg Saint-Antoine
01
Mar
I’m currently reading the new Verso translation of Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris. It’s a beautifully imagined book, full of colourful descriptions of Parisian places. I’ll review it soon, but in the meantime, here’s what Hazan says about the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a notoriously radical Parisian locale:
The present Faubourg retains few material traces of this glorious past, and only the friends of Red Paris mentally raise their hats when they cross Rue Charles-Delescluze and remember that at the crossroads of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine and Rue de Cotte they are on the site of the barricade where the representative of the people Alphonse Baudin was killed for twenty-five francs. But even if the proximity of the Bastille Opera now disagreeably contaminates the first few metres of the Faubourg, even if Rue de Lappe, long since deserted by the Auvergnats, is no longer the haven that it once was for modern art, still the Aligre market, the fountains on the corner of Rue de Charonne and in the square in front of the Saint-Antoine hospital, the courtyards where illustrators and computer buffs, Chinese artisans and photographers, work cheek by jowl – this unique mixture maintains the quarter’s identity as plebeian and industrious. If, taking up Marcel Duchamp’s idea, we should manufacture cans of Air de Paris, it is certainly that of Faubourg Saint-Antoine with which I would fill mine. (124)
Eric Hazan will be in conversation with Iain Sinclair in London’s Institut Francais this Wednesday 3rd March. (Details here.)
22
Jul
This evening in Berlin, a new literary journal will be launched. Titled The Kakofonie, and edited by John Holten, the contributors come from Italy, Germany, Ireland, the USA and Denmark. In the first issue, American cruciverbalist Charlie Stadtlander provides a crossword puzzle, French-based Irish artist John Lalor provides a textual exploration of notions of the void, and there are stories and poems from Luke Sheehan, Patrick O’Beirne, Christian Ward and Andrea Bedorin. In addition, I contribute an essay on Georges Perec and urban form. The first issue is available for download in PDF format here.
10
May
Laura’s started a blog about caricatures, looking at contemporary chaps what draw (Steve Bell, for example) and auld fellas from years ago (Daumier, for one). Expect a post on why noted pioneer of photography, Nadar, was also an underrated cartoonist, and other engaging tales from mid-19th century Paris. Read her blog here.
09
Oct
The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Fair play, etc. What caught my attention was the statement from the Swedish Academy:
As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality
As a fan of the ‘degenerate state of everyday speech’ which so enlivened the twentieth century novel (particularly in the works of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Raymond Queneau) my initial reaction to this statement was a terse: ‘fuck you’.
See NY Times here.
08
Oct
Just finished Paul Fournel’s book Need for the Bike, which arrived through the post this morning. A philosophical musing on the bicycle, along with lots of practical and moving tales of experience in the saddle, I plan to dip into it as frequently as possible. Fournel, who is a writer and publisher based in Paris, is also the president of the OuLiPo group of writers, of which Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino were members. Here is a particularly good passage from Fournel’s book:
Some of the guys who raced in my area were in the habit of going to obscure dispensaries to improve their performance. One day I went along with two friends who were supposed to race in a time trial on the Forez plain. The race was on a circuit of about forty kilometers, and the starting line also served as the finish line. So it was a perfect circle, and they were hoping that the best riders could do it in less than an hour.
An oddball that we knew, who had no other goal in life than to ride faster than his local friends, took off like a shot and crossed the line going the other way barely ten minutes later.
Everyone was waving his arms around, trying to get him to show some common sense, but he didn’t see any problems. He came over to me, got off his bike, and told me: ‘I think my time was good.’
We had to hide him for a few hours in the back seat of a Citroen to keep official eyes from seeing the foam dripping from his lips and to give him a chance to calm down.
As they used to say, ‘he’d even swallowed the box.’
03
Sep
The air outside has been thick with the smell of hops from the Guinness brewery since last night. It must mean I’m back in Dublin, after my travels to London, Paris and West Cork. And it’s September, which means: back to the PhD.
Last Monday’s Irishman’s Diary, about my trip to Groucho Marx’s house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is available here.
12
Aug
Tomorrow:
Train from Pearse Street to Dun Laoghaire
Boat from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead
Train from Holyhead to London
London:
to British Library
to Spurs v Everton on Tuesday night
to Global Cities exhibition, Tate Modern
Wednesday
London to Paris via Eurostar, from Waterloo to Paris Gare du Nord
