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Forget Jackie Collins or Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. My beach reading this summer was "A Rebours," (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I got it from Amazon about a year ago, probably because it was mentioned an a blog somewhere or another, and it's been sitting uncracked by my bedside ever since. For some reason I imagined it as being some sort of mind-altering, world-remodelling reverie. Ironically, it is in fact a lampoon of an aesthete mentally masturbating himself into 'mind-altering, world-remodelling' reveries. Leave it to the French to extend the intellectual hand in friendship, only to withdraw at the moment of acceptance. Psych. So, as the franco-american culture war blisters up over Lance, I too am a casualty. Michael Penn suggests that the United States was the first super-power not to take over the world, though clearly by 1947 it had. According to Huysmans that process was well underway in 1884, at least in the cultural domain. But the book is a real treat and I'll mention a few points of interest: It was written as a reaction to the 'Naturalism' of the day, which favored quasi-anthropoligical studies of conventional people; Huysmens felt this had run into a dead end by ruling out the 'exceptional.' His choice of anti-protagonist Des Esseintes is a debauched aristocrat who, possibly anticipating the Situationists, invents his own private world. While describing Des Esseintes as morally corrupt, the narrator catalogs the character's cultural tastes. My suspicious nature assumed that these tastes were in opposition to the author's, but then I had second thoughts when reading the praises of Petronius' 'Satyricon.' You just can't fake that kind of enthusiasm. Following the book itself is a wonderfully candid introduction written about 20 years after the first printing, wherin the author for the most part claims Des Esseintes' assertions as his own, with only minor revisions over the years. Damn wiley French. Nevertheless, I am excited by the idea of using a novel as a platform for explicitly critiquing other literature [and in this case, visual arts as well.] In fact, it's a little like gangsta rap - dissin' the enemy faction [the Naturalists, Emile Zola in particular] and namechecking the up-and-coming Redon and Moreau. In fact part of my interest in both this book and the work of Redon comes via the films of Guy Maddin, who was himself a student of French literature before becoming a filmmaker. I'm always amazed at how deep the roots of slang run. In Huysmans' introduction as he speaks of his conversion to Catholocism: "... that he harries you, that he hunts you down, that he 'sweats' you, to use a vulgar but forceful police term..." Huysmans speaks of artifice in a way that anticipates Benjamin. In a chapter dedicated to horticulture:
And then there was Eduardo Kac. And as I was listening to the Smashing Pumpkins' 'Everalsting Gaze' on my iPod:
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