if some thing black: On Alix & Jacques Roubaud
Last week I read Dalkey Archive’s somewhat recent release, Alix’s Journal. It was written by Alix Cleo Roubaud, husband of the far-more-visible Jacques Roubaud. Immediately upon finishing Alix’s Journal, I read Jacques’s some thing black. Jacques was a poet, a mathematician, an eventual novelist, and a key player in the OuLiPo. Alix was never sure exactly what she was, other than Jacques wife–which she insisted on her role as with intensity. After Alix died, suddenly, in 1983 of a pulmonary embolism, Jacques began working on some thing black, which took its name from Alix’s series of photographic prints, if some thing black.
Both books, independently and intertextually, are fantastic works. But what becomes most interesting for me, perhaps, is the way in which the book interact. There seems to be a similar relationship between the books (the texts, the written words) as that between Jacques and Alix during their marriage. Alix’s Journal reveals a woman in a primarily male-dominated intellectual world. This is not academia, this is a realm of existence that I doubt still exists in the same way (though to be fair I live in a small town in Northern Illinois)– people, individuals, that care deeply about their own art and the art of others, with no specific ties to a University funding anybody’s motivations. A similar world is exposed in the first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals, and to be fair I can’t help but find it somewhat Utopian.
But this world is not at interest for the time being, because the world of the text that each book carries is one of sadness and desperation.
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November 9th, 2010 / 2:38 pm
November 9th, 2010 / 2:38 pm
What I Read While I Was In Europe
With two 10+ hour days of flying, plus several train days sitting between parts of Paris and Italy (including one where Ken and I went on a loop between the two, continually fucking up our connections), I had a lot of time during the 12 days of traveling in Europe with which to spend with my head stuck in a book. As a result, I plowed through 4 books and the beginning of a fifth, all works in translation, including titles by Jacques Roubaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eric Chevillard, Zoran Živković, and Werner Herzog.
Here are some brief thoughts on each:
The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud (Dalkey Archive)
Kicked off the trip with this fat badboy from Dalkey, which carried me up to Washington DC and then through several days in Paris. It’s one of the more original premises and executions of a book I’ve seen in a while, and no surprise in that it is from a major Oulipian. Basically, the book is a book about the book itself more than a book of normal concerns. Not quite a writer writing about writing (thank god), but more a writer spooled in the blank space between such, and crushed in his weird onslaught of memory, a dream conceit of trying to compose a novel that never exists, and the crippling brainspace of having lost a wife. Not quite nonfiction, not quite not, a text about text that manages to do a lot of beautiful examinations of life, such as making jelly, and the descriptions of shapes of rooms and light, among which I was surprised at how compelling he was able to keep the compulsion alive across such a massive tome that essentially is all talk of what it is over being what it is, but then extending through that to actually become the blank. Terrifying in the most on-its-face banal of ways, and electric for its method. Felt right to read this one in Paris, which I had not even realized the connection of which (nor, I swear, did I mean to bring all French authors to France, it just happened).
Bye America
Taking a random, spur of the moment trip with Ken B. to Paris, Turin, and wherever else things decide to tell us to get. Hopefully will still be chiming in on some of y’alls during that time, from Saturday to 8-10 days or so abroad.
Since I have the night to decide what books I’m going to bring with me on the two 14 hour flights, maybe I could use some help. I have a lot of books to choose from. If you feel like it, take a peek at the books I haven’t read, and make suggestions from the archives of which ones should come along in my bag?
Right now the arm of my sofa is placeholding The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud, The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. Not married to those selections, so any ‘Dude, read this, man’-ing would be most rad.
As well would any recommendations of must-see places in Paris, Turin, or the local outlying regions thereabout.
Bye!
