#clause baudelaire

[aranell18]

So I've been watching A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix and it's my sister and I had a conversation about why they didn't like it. I told them that so far I don't mind it and they are doing some things with the show that I wouldn't have thought they would. I told them it's not necessarily bad it's just a different way the story is being told and I think this point of view is quite interesting.

#violet baudelaire #clause baudelaire #sunny baudelaire #a series of unfortunate events #Netflix #lemony snicket #count olaf #Neil Patrick Harris #not bad just different

[asouefanworkevent]

and that's a wrap on the wicked way exchange!! always a little sad the day after an exchange ends, isn't it? everything is over now. no more working and editing and waiting and getting in last minute details and everything. but now there's so much exciting fanwork to see! look at it all!!! we all did this!!!!!

thank you all again for participating!!!!!! i'm so happy and so proud of you all. ⭐⭐



@lesbianscieszka: Interesting (esme and jerome), for @gray-zelle

@library-child: Associates (beatrice and olaf), for @hitsuzenhusbands

@gray-zelle: Hearts & Hives (jacquelyn/esme, jacques/jerome, olaf/esme), for @archangelsunited

@accidentallylita: Jacques and Olivia fic, for @snicketbae

@acacia-may: Good Things Find Their Way Back (baudelaires and quagmires post-canon), for @junowritesstuff

@memento-fugaces: Jacques and Quigley fic, for @nothing-to-see-here-bye-yall

@snicketbae: Jacques and Olivia art, for @accidentallylita

@volunteerfelinedetectives: SBTS Associates fic, for @cherrycokeisnice

@nothing-to-see-here-bye-yall: Snicket siblings art, for @bittersbetter

@hitsuzenhusbands: The Shattering of Thalia and Melpomene (beatrice and olaf), for @virginian-wolfsnake

@bittersbetter: SBTS Associates art, for @miriel-therindes

@virginian-wolfsnake: death of an enemy (esme after beatrice dies), for @navree

@navree: Two Scoops (lemony and babybea), for @acacia-may

@littlestsnicket: All the News in Fits of Print (moxie and geraldine), for @whoslaurapalmer

@miriel-therindes: Sugar Bowl Gen Class Photo art, for @larryy0urwaiter

@larryy0urwaiter: Bertrand and Lemony art, for @odd-kid-42

@snckt: Denouement edit, for @lyeekha

@lyeekha: Beatrice/Bertrand/Lemony) Lion Tamer art, for @littlestsnicket

@somewhat-bored: Late Night Thoughts (ellington/cleo), for @volunteerfelinedetectives

@whoslaurapalmer: sweetest things (pre-canon baudelaire family), for @snckt

@junowritesstuff: A Chance Encounter (violet/quigley post-canon), for @noodle-the-queen

@noodle-the-queen: Jacquelyn and Esme art, for @lesbianscieszka

@jacobsnicket: anyway, don't be a stranger (lemony returning to stain'd-by-the-sea), for @missingmae

@cherrycokeisnice: Two Years After "Why Is This Night Different Than All Other Nights?" (ellington and cleo), for @somewhat-bored

@odd-kid-42: Non-restrictive Clause to Some (lemony and moxie talk about asoue), for @library-child

@archangelsunited: On That Account (dewey in vfd), for @memento-fugaces

@missingmae: the misadventures of a very kind editor (lemony and the editor), for @jacobsnicket

#asoue #a series of unfortunate events #atwq #all the wrong questions #wicked way exchange

[johnmanciniwrites]

In Fragments We Trust

When, Why, and How to Write Incomplete Sentences

__

“Fragments are the only forms I trust.” – Donald Barthelme

The soundbite goes viral. People rally around a slogan. The meme speaks volumes. In our fragmented media landscape, complex truths have little place. It’s hard to know who to trust. This is nothing new.

In his 1857 poem, “The Swan,” Charles Baudelaire complained of an “immense nausea of billboards.” Who would have thought, even back then commercialism was overwhelming people with superficial distractions, empty promises. In a way, his portrayal of fragmented reality anticipates concerns of postmodernists like Barthelme, who also grappled with a deluge of sensory stimuli, existential anxieties. One key difference here is that Don B. had a healthy sense of humor—I can sort of see him smilesmirking à la Joyce when he talks about fragments—no Central European Miserableism for him, thank you very much.

If fragmentation is key to understanding the modern or post-modern or post-post-modern condition, that might explain why my Word software no longer offers a squiggly line when I write an incomplete sentence. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. But it should. Knowing when, why, and how to break the rules is an artist’s job.

One used to learn in grade school what makes a complete thought, when that thought “runs on” into another complete thought, when the writer should insert a period instead of a comma. But these days the nuts and bolts of grammar are rarely taught. If at all. Some universities offer tutoring sessions on fragments and run-ons. Attendance is optional.

So here's a tutoring session you can take at your leisure.

The well-placed fragment can add style and emphasis and even increase dramatic tension in your work. Fragments are often built on parallels, so it helps to have some understanding of syntax, such as being able to recognize a series of verb phrases when you write one. But a basic ear for language and voice should tell you when to pause with a comma, take a sip from the oversized Yeti or Stanley cup, and carry on. Or when you need to make a full stop. And then start again. A feel for rhythm and momentum can be learned. 

From Postcards by Annie Proulx:

Even before he got up he knew he was on his way.  Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew.  Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way.  Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.

The main clause (the complete thought) in the first two sentences is “he knew.” The fragment is built on the verb, knew. The first fragment announces a dramatic surprise in dramatic fashion. It increases urgency. The second is built on the modifying conditional phrase, even if. Repetition is key.

Here’s one from William Faulkner’s “Dry September”:

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass – the rumor, the story, whatever it was.  Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro.  Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

The fragment here is an appositive, basically the fourth item in the parallel list that tries to name the thing that had “gone like a fire in dry grass—the rumor, the story, whatever it was.” By isolating the last and most telling of the items in this list Faulkner strikes a power chord that emphasizes the scandal. It's also worth noting the long final sentence there, which seems to spread, from comma to comma, like the rumor itself.   

Here’s one from Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy:

We sat in the car instead, the broad front seat.  There was the scent of stale cigarettes and old joints and the sweet smell of the beach towel I held on my lap.  You were tan and wore the leather band around your right wrist. Just out of Stony Brook.  Worked a charter fishing boat all summer.  Wanted to own one of your own.  Wanted to see the west coast.  Never went into the city, didn’t like it.  Couldn’t imagine living in a place like Rosedale, going to college way up in Buffalo.  A Bonacker, a real Bonacker.  But your mouth was dry and your eyes dark brown.

These seven parallel fragments are all extensions of the previous sentence which tells us what you were. Most of them are verb phrases in which the you is implied (worked, wanted, went, didn’t like, couldn’t imagine) and the final fragment breaks this pattern with an implied intransitive verb (you were a bonacker). Notice how she returns to a complete sentence for the final line in this paragraph, breaking the pattern and adding closure.

You can build fragments with resumptive modifiers, by repeating a word and saying more about it. Consider the following example from Tobias Wolff’s “The Other Miller”:

For once, everybody else is on the outside and Miller is on the inside. Inside, on his way to a hot shower, dry clothes, a pizza, and a warm bunk.

Like the example from Faulkner, the following fragment is an appositive, which could have easily been incorporated into the sentence it is modifying—perhaps with an em dash—but the writer isolates it with fragmentation. It is also an appositive, essentially a long parallel modifier that renames “coal miners.”

From Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games:

Our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at this hour. Men and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many who have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails, the lines of their sunken faces. But today the black cinder streets are empty. Shutters on the square grey houses are closed. The reaping isn’t until two. May as well sleep in. If you can.

I like that one at the end. If you can. The well-placed fragment announces itself. The sentence could have read “May as well sleep in—if you can” and perhaps achieved a similar effect. But by fragmenting the final phrase she cuts up the rhythm even more and adds an eerie tension to the notion of trying to sleep through what's coming. Which makes sense. This is, after all, the day of the reaping.                                  

So have no fear of fragments. They are not Baudelairean billboards, nor les fleurs du mal. They are not incorrect. No red pen required. In fact, their experimental and unconventional nature may be a proper reaction to our fragmented world. A more authentic reflection of the human condition in the twenty-first century.

#writing tips #writing advice #how to write #creative writing #fragments #suzzane collins #alice mcdermott #william faulkner #annie proulx #donald barthelme #charles baudelaire

[lavernawiper]

Day 12, "slippery". The slippery slope in The Slippery Slope from A Series of Unfortunate Events at its most slippery. ASOUE is one of, if not my most favorite book series ever and everyone should read it, the writing is awe-inspiring. Also the Netflix show was okay. I obviously took a lot of inspiration from Brett Helquist's illustrations, they're so perfect for the series.

#inktober 2020 #a series of unfortunate events #asoue #lemony snicket #illustration #traditional art #pen and ink #brett helquist #violet baudelaire #clause baudelaire #sunny baudelaire #quigley quagmire #fan art #artists on tumblr #netflix #my art

[langblr-o-kebek]

Practice the Subjunctive with Tragédie

(Probably not what they intended to happen with this song but who cares)

As you will see, this song is not in the slightest a great song-it’s catchy (Cette chanson est accrochante) but alas, Tragédie is no Baudelaire when it comes to poetry and lyric. 

Song lyrics are in Bold with their translation in regular font under each line. Subjunctive clauses (the trigger phrase and the conjugated verb) are Bold underlined Italic, finally, slang words will be asterisked. A few times there will be a slang word used as a verb, you will notice it will not follow normal conjugation rules or any conjugation at all. I didn’t translate the whole song, only the beginning and the chorus are heavy in subjunctive.

Cette soirée c'est pour toi et moi Tonight is for you and me Faut que ça slam* It’s got to slam Ne me déçoit pas Don’t disappoint me Faut que tu bouges You have to move Et que tu danses And you have to dance Sur ce son faut que tu déhanches Sway your hips to the sound Quoique tu dises Whatever you say Je serai ton homme I’ll be your man Quoique tu fasses Whatever your do Faut que tu restes en forme You have to feel it Si tu veux bouge contre moi If you want, move against me Si ce n'est pas toi ce sera moi If you don’t, I will Ma baby danse pour moi My baby dance for me Emmène-moi où tu vas Take me where you go Quand tu bouges comme cela When you move like that Tu sais que j'aime trop ça You know I love it so much {x2} Faut que ça balance It’s got to match En rythme et en cadence The rythym and step Faut qu'à chaque fois que j'y pense Every time I think of it it has to Ça me mette en transe Put me in a trance Oh oh oh oh oh oh... Il faut que ça soit chaud It’s got to be hot C'est toi qui fait mon show* You put on a show for me Je veux que tu danses sexy pour moi! I want you to dance sexy for me

#langblr #french #francais #tragédie #sexy pour moi #vocabulaire francaise #subjonctif

[ucchi-kouki]

Uchiyama Kouki on Foreign Movie and Drama (2000s/Before 2010s)

You actually can look it up in his Wikipedia page, both Japanese and English, but it’s for the sake of easier look up. I make this list from his Japanese wikipedia page cause it’s usually more accurate and complete. Also I divided it into 2 part cause after I look at it, he has been on a quiet lot foreign movie than I thought he would be.

Notes : The year here probably the year of the movie release in Japan, cause I found some movies that actually released a year before but doesn’t include there. Example : Peter Pan listed in 2004 though it’s originally released on 2003.

So, here we go!

2000

Mom’s Got a Date with Vampire, as Adam, the male protagonist

2001

The Jennie Project, as Andrew Archibald

A.I. Artificial Inteligence

2002

The Santa Clause 2, as minor character

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, as minor character

Lord of The Rings, as minor character

2003

Cheaper by The Dozens, as Dylan

Poil de carotte, as Rémy

Pirates of Caribbean : The Curse of Black Pearl, as kid Will Turner (the adult is voiced by Hirakawa Daisuke)

2004

Secondhand Lions, as Walter Caldwell (in soft version (?), the Tokyo TV version is voiced by Honda Takako)

King Arthur, as kid Arthur

The Return (Russian movie), as Ivan

Peter Pan, as Slightly

I, Cesar, as Morgan Boulanger

I’m Not Scared (Italian Movie), as Michele Amitrano

2005

Oliver Twist, as Noah Claypole

The United States of Leland, as Ryan Pollard

Finding Neverland, as George Llewelyn Davies

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, as Klaus Baudelaire

2006

The Adventure of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D, as Sharkboy

Starsky & Hutch, as Willis Lewis

Doctor Who, on episode 20, as minor character

Mentors, as minor character

2007

Notes on a Scandal, as Steven Connolly

Without a Trace season 3, episode 20, as Aaron

The Legend (Korean drama), as young Hogae

Monk season 4, as Jarrad (?)

2008

City of Men (Brazillian movie), as Larajinha/Wallace

The Ron Clark Story, as minor character

2009

Shinjuku Incident (Hong Kong movie), as minor character

Terminator Salvation (Terminator 4), as Kyle Reese

Underdog, as Jack Unger

Primeval series 2, episode 4

So, that’s all there is now. I’m quite shocked when I know he’s actually the Japanese voice of Sharkboy cause I watched that movie several times when I was younger.

I’m going to update the next part when I have the time. Have a nice day!

#uchiyama kouki #kouki uchiyama #kōki uchiyama #uchiyama kouki works #uchiyama kouki in foreign movie #uchiyama kouki movie

[oftwodarkmoons]

At any rate, I think my love of clothes has at least partly to do with my love of detail. Lots of writers have been clothes horses and dandies - Proust, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Colette all come to mind...even Emily Dickinson in her white muslin dresses or Ivy Compton-Burnett with her diamond brooches and severe Victorian black. Poring through racks of vintage clothes or obsessing over just the right shade of sky-blue or violet satin for the lining of a black jacket stems from exactly the same impulse that makes me tinker happily with a sentence all afternoon, changing adjectives and moving clauses around until it's just right. Then, too: I so enjoy looking at other people's clothes that it seems only proper to take a little care with my own. As Isabella Blow so famously said: "My style icon is anyone who makes a bloody effort."

Sensitive and Powerful: An Interview with Donna Tartt by Florence Welch featured in Rookie Yearbook Four edited by Tavi Gevinson, 2015

#Quotes #Donna Tartt #Florence Welch #Marcel Proust #Colette #Emily Dickinson #Baudelaire #Oscar Wilde #Ivy Compton-Burnett #Isabella Blow #Tavi Gevinson #Rookie Yearbook Four #Clothes #Women Wearing Looks #Authorial Sartorial

[ericrosenfield]

Omniscient Voice and Middle Grade Fiction

Some openings of Middle Grade novels I like:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: 

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. 

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginnings

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Holes:

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. 

 There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland. There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.

Mister Monday

They had tried to destroy the Will, but that proved to be beyond their power. So they broke it, in two ways. It was broken physically, torn apart, with the fragments of heavy parchment scattered across both space and time. It was broken in spirit because not one clause of it had been fulfilled.

Howl's Moving Castle

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloask of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

It’s common wisdom that the omniscient narrator went out of style with the 19th century, but it seems like (at least in the opening) it’s alive and well in SF Middle Grade fiction.

At least with fantasy it certainly helps emphasize the fairy tale quality of the story, or the epic scope of it.

(And yes, I know that A Series of Unfortunate Events is actually narrated by someone who turns out to be a character in the story. He’s still functionally an omniscient narrator, even if sometimes he claims not to know something.)

#writing #fiction #pov #middlegrade

[ellie-kallmier-blog]

THE DEATH OF THE ARTIST

I was reading a few pieces during the research process for this assessment and the one text that kept getting referred to across just about all the different sources was Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author (1967). The essay is pretty striking to read and really breaks down the conception of Author in literature, and as I was reading it I kept thinking of the parallels to my research on authorship in art. So, I decided to re-appropriate the text and replaced ‘Author’ with ‘Artist’, ‘text’ with ‘work’, ‘reader’ with ‘audience’ and a few other alterations to retain the flow and ideas of the piece. This really contextualised for me a lot of what I’d been thinking about already, and I think communicates my ideas in a much more sophisticated and eloquent way than I would be able to write. This little experiment not only has content that explores ideas of authorship in creative practices, but as the action of creating this written piece is a direct reference to that content. I’m thinking of using at least a quote or excerpt from the writing in my statement at some point, as it just sums up my process and ideas throughout this assessment so well. 

This is the full text with my changes made

This is a fuller collection of the best bits, edited a little more thoroughly to keep a good flow etc.

EXCERPTS FROM THE DEATH OF THE ARTIST

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the Artist enters their own death, Art begins.

The image of art to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centred on the Artist, their person, their history, their tastes, their passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of art, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the Artist, which delivered their “confidence."

The Artist is never anything more than the man who creates, just as I is no more than the man who says I: art knows a "subject," not a "person," end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make art "work," that is, to exhaust it.

The Artist, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of their own work: the work and the Artist take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Artist is supposed to feed the book — that is, they pre-exist it, think, suffer, lives for it; they maintain with their work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with their child. Quite the contrary, the modern creator is born simultaneously with their work; they are in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends their Art, they are in no way the subject of which their work is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the creation, and every work is eternally created here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to make can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of "painting" (as the Classic creators put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which creation has no other content than the act by which it is created.

The Artist can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; their only power is to combine the different kinds of Art, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain themselves by just one of them; if they want to express themselves, at least they should know that the internal "thing" they claim to "translate" is itself only a readymade dictionary whose symbols can be explained (defined) only by other symbols.

The claim to "decipher" a work becomes quite useless. To give an Artist to a work is to impose upon that work a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the Art. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Artist (or their hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Artist is discovered, the piece is "explained:' the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Artist should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism should be overthrown along with the Artist.

The true locus of Art is experiencing.

In this way is revealed the whole being of Art: a work consists of multiple pieces, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the Artist, as we have hitherto said it was, but the audience: the audience is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a work consists of; the unity of a work is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the audience is a person without history, without biography, without psychology; they are only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the work is constituted.

The audience has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other person in art but the one who creates. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to Art its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the audience must be ransomed by the death of the Artist.

REFERENCES:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roland-Gerard-Barthes

https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

https://www.allymcginn.com/research-blog/2017/12/10/research-authorship-creation-originality-appropriation-authenticity-and-ownership

#adad1002 #assessment2 #Authorship

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) The Baudelaire Fractal, by Lisa Robertson

Gloria Dawson explores the refractive, highly seductive sensorium and aesthetic rapture of Lisa Robertson’s new novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House Books, 2020)

> I am deeply and highly seduced by this book, in which the narrator, Hazel Brown, a form of Lisa Robertson herself, recalls her becoming as a girl who wants to write, who does write, and along the way realises that it is true that she is the author of everything Baudelaire ever wrote. This is a strange conceit (to my mind also a very poetic jab at the whole conceit of a conceit) that provides a sort of architecture, but isn’t integral to the one-way direction of a plot. This conceit remains a conceit; a true one, but never, as in a conventional novel, a fact. The clue of this book is in the name; it’s fractal, there is no conclusion, the villain and hero is the girl, Hazel Brown, and her desires.

> My desire for perfumes is a curiosity which I have kept in check due partly to a sort of leftwing ascetism, and partly just lack of spare cash. But during the pandemic, two friends have sent me scents, and so it’s not surprising that one of the aspects of the book I experienced most strongly is the narrator’s relationship to perfume. > Sillage is the degree to which a perfume’s scent lingers in the air when worn. It is a unit of time; like a radioactive particle’s potency, it decays by its own particular degrees. I see in Robertson a refraction of Baudelaire’s prose poem, ‘Invitation to A Voyage’, where a queasy luxury is subtly undermined by the impossible identification of persons and political regimes with that luxury: ‘Those treasures, that furniture, that luxury, that order, those perfumes, those miraculous flowers, they are yourself.’ In the chapter ‘Scent-Bottle', framed partly through a bottle of Estee Lauder’s ‘Youth-Dew’, a gift from her grandmother, the narrator recalls:

Always now the thought of the perfume in its cheap fluted glass bottle with gold paper label brings me back to that shitty room, its darkness, the blue typewriter on the folding table, the bad linoleum, these traits a carapace camouflaging a small freedom that gently expanded inside me like a subtle new organ, an actual muscular organ born of my own desire for what I took to be an impossible and necessary language. Its sillage was an architecture.

Unlike Baudelaire, Robertson’s parataxis is without luxury. Even the perfume, or at least its carapace, is cheap. The scent of the clauses following that list is typical of the way in which Robertson’s sentences breathe into a form that branches whilst still following its line into a direction of freedom (a small freedom, a freedom that is/like an organ, organ developing its matter), a direction of desire. And then in five words; a proposal and also a proposition. Follow me again into a conceit. The dissipation of scent as a unit of time, imprecise but unmistakable, turns up later in the descriptions of the avoidance or impossibility of both cleanliness and its aesthetic. If the poet stinks, Hazel Brown tells us (and she did), ‘the poem must stink’ too.

Even reading the diary now I seem to detect the long sillage of acrid barks and herbs unctuously covered by vanilla, so that I am unsure whether years ago some amber drops of the viscous liquid actually penetrated the paper or whether my imagination produces this perfume as an insistent and elaborately feminine base note of reading. Nadar said of the young Baudelaire that he poured drops of musk oil from a small glass vial onto his red carpets when he entertained his friends in his baroque apartment at the Hotel Pimodan. I had entered the musky sillage. The deepening life of reading was now the transmission of an atmosphere, a physiology of pleasure and its refusal or its augmentation by the several ghost-senses that moved between the phrases of a text.

Here is a blossoming of that tight conceit — ‘Its sillage was an architecture’ — nestled and unravelling at a different point in time in the narrative; a long sillage indeed. I love Robertson’s unwavering mistrust of luxury and cleanliness, the authoritarian identification of cleanliness with moral purity which is more insistently satirized in Baudelaire. Yet despite his critique, Baudelaire, as Hazel Brown knows, was as weak to luxury as the next man or girl, and in reweaving a Baudelairean narrative, Hazel Brown as Baudelaire as Robertson can reveal her own desires and undoings. Returning to ‘The Scent Bottle’, the chapter ends in a luxurious apartment that Baudelaire may have coveted and wrought, in which the narrator is informally employed as a housemaid-childminder:

Those tight rooms first exposed me to the domesticity and decor of wealth and the erasures and contradictions it masked. Everywhere there was damage. In the rooms filled with rarity and the dullness of familial hatred and jealousy, in the now-forgotten password spoken to the armed soldiers at the school, in the prying glance of the concierge, in the horrible statues of shoeshine boys, all of these things functions of varying scales of imposed and policed positionings of superiority, I thought I could intuit the whole sadistic spectrum of the political world. It was heavy with grief. This sensation was not aesthetical; it was the enforced affect of the sex of a political economy, of masked histories of colonialism, of the ugliness of wealth.

Before we can grasp the scent of these judgements (‘the whole sadistic spectrum of the  political world... the enforced affect of the sex of a political economy’), the jagged line of Robertson’s fractal rhetoric is at work on another plane; the erotics at work in the work of following a realisation of an apprenticeship, a vocation for the matter of writing:

My dream of grace, the difficult ideal I struggled towards in sex and in paintings, my unformed language for this feeling that was trying so mawkishly to become a life, would have nothing to do with what passed for luxury. But it couldn’t be anchored by sadness either. I felt sure that beauty could only be slovenly and that love also could only be a slut.

Re-recalling moving through Paris and its political economy, and following the line of her pen from the censuring of Baudelaire’s ‘anachronous embrace of the baroque’, Hazel Shade reaches yet another conclusion-opening.

There could be no aesthetics of ambivalence in Second Empire Paris; capital’s tenure permitted sincerity only. The sincere subject was governable. But beneath the city was another city, a place where monstrosity could find its double.... this other city was even more potently a linguistic city, a gestural city, a city released from certain texts by their readers, as a sillage is the release of an alternate time signature by the perfumed body. No perfume, no syntax, no flower can be definitively policed.

Perfume can be liberation, an ‘alternate time signature’, a grace caught in fractal moments. It takes the courage of this book not to dissolve or just be mute in the apprehension of everything that you can touch and know that putting you together it undoes you. Towards the end of the book, the narrator, sometimes dis-guised as Lisa Robertson, re-reads a favourite essay, Emile Benveniste’s ‘The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression’. Robertson’s reflection upon what moves the writer is for me a close summary for the work of this book. It touches again on how clothes and styles, as well as perfume, can be a vital form of our thinking, being, becoming.

Form is a gestural passage that we can witness upon a garment in movement, a face in living expression, or in the mobile marks of a written character as it is traced by the pen. Rhythm, an expression of form, is time, but it is time as the improvisation that moves each limited body in play with a world. Not necessarily metrical or regular, it’s the passing shapeliness that we inhabit. It both has a history and is the history that our thinking has made.

I want to spend many hours tracing the rapture of this book, as well as its seductions. Rapture; to be seized but also to be possessed by joy; seduced: to be drawn aside but also led astray, wholly fractal, line by line into the story’s willing and willed disintegration. [With many thanks to Andy Spragg for the editorial comments, and to all the friends I talked about this book with! None of our work is ever done alone.]

The Baudelaire Fractal is now available to order via Coach House Books.

~

Text & Image: Gloria Dawson Published: 30/6/20

#review #Lisa Robertson #fiction #novel #Gloria Dawson #reviews #fiction reviews #Coach House Books

[rainbow-phannie]

Why does Dan in glasses look exactly like a grown up clause Baudelaire!??!

He kinda does! But you know what's funny? That Daniel Handler created that character and they have the same initials! I mean Dan and that guy! 😄