Prisionero sin horizonte
Oigo los ruidos de la calle
Y veo sólo un cielo hostil
Y el blanco muro de mi cárcel

Huye la tarde en mi prisión
Una dulce lámpara arde
Estamos solos en mi celda
Bella luz razón adorable

(Poema de Guillaume Apollinaire, pseudónimo de Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apollinary de Wąż-Kostrowicki, en versión de Andrés Holguin: tomado de la página A media voz )

BibliO est née à Saïda (Liban) le jour où ses grand-parents maternels étaient assassinés à Chatilla (Liban aussi).
De son père, un jeune casque bleu venu déminé le sud Liban il ne lui reste que quelques photos et les chansons de Pat Benatar qu'elle écoute lors de ses coups de blues.
De sa mère elle a le teint pain d'épice et les longues jambes. Et ses grands yeux verts...
BibliO c'est Bibli pour livre (et non pas bible. D'ailleurs, Dieu, après Sabra et Chatilla, après la mine israélienne, après l'exil de sa mère et les longues journées d'hiver francilien, elle n'y pense même pas).
O c'est Orientale. Les plus belles femmes de ce monde (selon son père disséminé par une mine cinq ans après sa naissance).
BibliO donc.
Elle passa son enfance et son adolescence dans une cité d'Alfortville. Nous y reviendrons...
BibliO habite un petit deux pièces au sixième étage d'un immeuble d'une petite cité HLM (merci monsieur le maire) et travaille à la bibliothèque municipale. BibliO est bibliothécaire, après une maitrise d'histoire, une année spéciale à l'IUT de Bordeaux III et le concours de bibliothécaire territorial. Parcours banal s'il en est. BibliO est Directrice. Elle s'acharne à faire cohabiter treize personnes sur l'emploi du temps affiché derrière son bureau (dont trois à mi-temps, une à 80%, une en disponibilité, deux en formation et seulement trois hommes).
Quand elle n'est pas à la bibliothèque ou dans quelques réunions BibliO fait du trapèze, de la boxe française (vous voilà averti) et milite aux cotés des sans-papiers.
Normal, quoique, BibliO lit beaucoup : Allah n'est pas obligé de Kourouma est son livre de chevet, avec les poèmes de Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Les chansons madécasses d'Evariste Parny et Apollinaire (pas seulement pour la poésie...)
BibliO n'aime pas la viande ; ou plutôt n'aime pas en manger. Se contente de fruits, de légumes, de graines en tout genre ("mon petit oiseau" disait son père éparpillé par une mine sioniste cinq ans après sa naissance). Elle aime aussi le fromage et le poisson, le jus de pomme et le vin rouge ; mais la bière beurk !
BibliO n'a pas de moche voiture, elle préfère assoir son postérieur sur la selle de son vélo, hummm.
Voilà pour les présentations sommaires.
Sinon BibliO à un petit chat noir tatoué sur la fesse gauche.

]]> http://garblednoise.wordpress.com/?p=118 Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:52:22 +0000 Martyn http://garblednoise.wordpress.com/?p=118  

I've just finished an excellent book called Bohemians: The Birth Of Modern Art : Paris 1900-1930  by French writer, Dan Franck. It chronicles life in and around the Montmartre district of Paris in the early part of the 20th century, when it was home to a loose group of artists, poets, writers and political radicals. It's a beautifully written book, full of colour and the detail of everyday life. The characters depicted are a complete joy, their lives at times haphazard but always idealistic. In more cynical times it's refreshing to read about creative people who still believed they could change the way the wider society looked at the world.

As well as the likes of Andre Breton, Apollinaire, and the dominant presence of Picasso, there are a whole host of more minor players on the Montmartre scene, which taken together gives the reader a real sense of a living, bustling community. In turn that helps you understand the arena within which the greats were operating.

Take for instance Arthur Cravan, who claimed (with little real evidence) to be Oscar Wilde's nephew on his mother's side. After wandering around the world and undertaking a variety of occupations which included being a sailor, an orange-picker, a serpent charmer, a hotel porter, a woodcutter, a boxing champion, a driver and a thief he founded the arts magazine Maintenant. Any notions of objective creative criticism went firmly out of the window, instead he used it as a vehicle to slag off anyone who wasn't his claimed uncle, Oscar Wilde.

He did so in colourful terms. Of Andre Gide he said : 'There is nothing remarkable about his bone structure; his hands are those of a lazy man...In addition, the artist's face is sickly; towards his temples, little leaves of skin detach themselves, similar to dandruff or a little bigger; as one would say vulgarly, 'he's peeling.'

Of Suzanne Valadon he said : 'She does know some useful little formulas, but simplifying and being simplistic are not the same thing, old cow !'

And he inflamed the temper of Apollinaire when he spoke of his lover  Marie Laurencin as 'a woman who needs to have someone lift her skirt and give her a big - somewhere.'

Intermediaries were called in to negotiate in the dispute, and eventually Cravan clarified his opinion of Laurencin as follows :

'There's a woman who needs to have someone lift her skirt and giver her a big astronomy lesson in her Variety Show'

It doesn't record what Apollinaire thought of that. This is the way people should discuss stuff on Newsnight Late Review.

Degas was probably not someone to invite around to dinner. Upon receiving an invitation from his dealer, Vollard he accepted after making a few stipulations. There could be no butter in the cooking, no flowers on the table, only a thin mist of light could be visible, the cat had to be locked up, there must be no dog, the women were not to wear perfume, and dinner had to be served at precisely seven thirty. Vollard himself was famed for falling asleep at the drop of a hat.  Posing for portraits he would regularly nod off, and was known to slip into slumber between courses at the dinner table.

Bohemians is full of those kind of little details of a world, and a way of being an artist that is unlikely to ever return. It also gives you an insight into some of the artistic movements of the time and the groundbreaking work done by people who favoured poverty, integrity and ideas over fame and fortune.

Things I need to say today:

• Can you people please keep up with my pace?
• I met two guys today who wept throughout Wall-E. The thing is phenomenal, people, and something we all should see before trash compactors begin to regurgitate songs from "Hello, Dolly!" and take over the world.
• OMG, OMG, the sun is out, OMG.
• My room is a mess again. I have far too many books, clothes and makeup for the amount of space they give me.
• I get cable on Saturday, four weeks before the start of SHARK WEEK.
• My summer quest of catching something significantly larger than a sunfish will begin Saturday when I receive my rod. Huzzah.
• Your shoes are in my room.
• Junior Mints have significantly reduced the size of their "King Size" box. If I were a king, I'd be severely disappointed.
• MLA style is great for research papers. Stop using it to overrule my decisions on press materials. You're comma-crazy. I don't like it.

That will be all.

“Raro il simbolo in questa nostra epoca. Raro nel linguaggio, tanto più lo è nell’Arte. Oggi la comunicazione tenta l’immediatezza, gioca nel presente e pare voler escludere quasi aprioristicamente ciò che è assenza, lontananza, distanza. Nulla altrove, tutto qui. Una sorta di hic et nunc che soprattutto esclude i percorsi labirintici della fantasia e prelude al mistero.

Al contrario Maria Luisa Grimani si lascia tentare dai giochi dell’assurdo e quasi ricerca – divertita?, appassionata?, intimorita? – di là dallo specchio di Alice il senso – quello vero? – delle cose. La mente non si distrae. Le mani lavorano come quelle del chirurgo.

Sapere non è sapienza. Dove la verità? Non nella parola e nemmeno nella forma. Né nell’idea. Ma là e lì. E oltre ancora. Parolaformaideaconcettomisterogioco.

Invenzione. Simbolo del nuovo reale che l’occhio può finalmente vedere e sentire e subito capire.

Il faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthetico-idéographiquement, au lieu de analytico-discursivement. Apollinaire.

La parola si libera dai consueti nessi sintattici. Il linguaggio si concentra in vocaboli autonomamente espressivi che irradiano quasi automaticamente una forma sospesa fra il bianco-infinito del foglio e il nero finito del segno grafico. Un processo di pulizia estetica che nasce dall’umiltà di chi, rifiutando il giro di parole dell’espressione o le forme già note della natura – la sicurezza dell’uomo aristotelico – vuole soprattutto manifestare il proprio senso di inadeguatezza di fronte ad una realtà intuita come mondo ancora sconosciuto, mistero.

Scopro un libretto prezioso sui poeti simbolisti e in particolar modo mi soffermo su Jean-Arthur Rimbaud e Mallarmé già visti alla mostra Origini dell’astrattismo.

Sembra che tutto si ricolleghi in modo fantastico.

Classique Larousse

Verlaine et les poètes symbolistes

par Alexandre Micha - Juillet 1943

Alexandre Micha scrive, tra l’ altro, di Jean-Arthur Rimbaud:

« Abandonnant les routines et les traditions il part à la découverte d’un monde nouveau, il déclare que le poète est un « voyant » et que par un « long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens », il doit se mettre en contact avec le réel authentique. Lui-même sera vraiment, surtout dans ses Illuminations, le poète au sens étymologique du mot, le fabricateur d’un monde supra-sensible. Le démiurge qui fait surgir des visions parfois sans lien entre elles, mais révélatrices d’un univers dont la notre ne serait que le reflet. Et pour prendre possession de ce monde mystérieux qui échappe aux lois de la logique enfantine des savants, notre poète s’entraîne à l’hallucination, il nous l’a confié dans Une saison en enfer, sorte d’autobiographie morale. Il rêve, pour le traduire, d’un « verbe accessible à tous les sens, qui serait de l’âme pour l’âme, résumant tout, parfums, couleurs, sons, de la pensée accrochant la pensée et la tirant ».

Mentre su Stéphane Mallarmé leggo :

« c’est que le poète s’est proposé une tâche inouïe : partir de la sensation, la restituer à force d’art dans toute sa fraïcheur première et permettre d’accéder par ces sons, ces parfums, ces couleurs et la pulpe des mots, jusqu’à l’idée pure des choses…

Mallarmé entend : « redonner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu » et encore « de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue et comme incantatoire ».

Cerco di creare immagini, ideogrammi di un pensiero, dove l’attimo colto riassuma tutte le sensazioni possibili accessibili ai nostri sensi: ritmo, colore, suono, reali o virtuali.

La leggerezza, l’essenzialità, la semplicità come massimo obbiettivo sono percorsi che non abbandono mai e seguirli è un impegno categorico.

Des quais de Grenelle à ceux de Bercy

Elle s'abandonne à l'eau qui la mène

Parmi le brouillard ou les éclaircies.

Il faut l'écouter, qui glisse et s'efface

Au fil du courant, sous l'arche d'un pont,

Tandis que l'écho rasant la surface

Porte vers l'aval un peu de l'amont.

C'est une comptine autour des marelles

Dans un matin pur, à Ménilmontant,

La complainte des fillettes rebelles

Dans le château du roi des Bons-Enfants.

Et chaque saison reprend le poème

Qui joint l'enchanteur du pont Mirabeau

A deux amoureux penchés sur eux-même,

A des vagabonds dormant près de l'eau.

Sur un air venu du temps des sirènes

Un vieux limonaire en moud le refrain

- Et c'est la chanson de Paris sur Seine

Qui s'enlace au jour limpide et serein.

Puis, quand les sommeils vont à la dérive

Par la ville sourde étouffant ses bruits

-O dernier passant, veilleur de la rive

C'est une chanson des bords de la nuit.

                 André Hardelet.

Je passai au bord de la Seine

Un livre ancien sous le bras

Le fleuve est pareil à ma peine

Il s'écoule et ne tarit pas

Quand donc finira la semaine.

                              Apollinaire

Ci si dovrebbe fermare solo un attimo prima, come al gioco delle bocce, vince chi si avvicina di più al pallino, non a chi tira delle mine pazzesche o chi affonda di più la propria boccia nella sabbia.

Esprimere significa esporsi. Meglio non farlo quando non hai un cazzo da dire, no?

"Oto ja wobec wszystkich człowiek przy zdrowych zmysłach
Znający życie i śmierć to co żyjący znać może
Który poznałem cierpienia i radości miłości
Który potrafiłem niekiedy narzucać swoje myśli
Znający wiele języków
Który niemało podróżowałem
[...]"

Heh, zaczyna pasowac, mówiąc nieskromnie.

Conosciuto come il maestro della Metafisica, De Chirico  fu anche poeta e dedicò diversi dipinti alla raffigurazione/interpretazione della "poesia", nonchè ad alcuni amici poeti del tempo.
Due di essi risalgono al 1914, ma già precedentemente il pittore aveva affrontato questo aspetto tematico, che è abbastanza ricorrente e forte nella sua vasta e sfaccettata produzione artistica.
Nella figura accanto La Nostalgia del poeta, (La Nostalgie du poéte) particolare, 1914, Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venezia (Fondazione Solomon R. Guggenheim N.Y.), l'opera è intrisa di magia, malinconia, e un forte senso di solitudine, che rimanda al proficuo rapporto di amicizia con Guillaume Apollinaire, a cui dedicò nello stesso anno l'opera La malinconia del poeta, Paris 1914 (Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou).
Sul tema della malinconia, trascrivo alcuni versi composti da Giorgio De Chirico poeta:

Malinconia di Giorgio De Chirico
Gravida d’amore e di pena
la mia anima si trascina
come una gatta ferita.
Bellezza delle svettanti ciminiere rosse.
Fumo solido.
Un treno fischia. Il muro.
Due carciofi di ferro mi guardano.
Avevo uno scopo. Lo stendardo non sventola
più. Felicità, felicità, ti cerco.

Un vecchietto dolcissimo cantava sottovoce
un cantico d’amore.
Il canto si perse nel frastuono
della folla e delle macchine.
Anche i miei canti e le mie lacrime si perderanno
nei tuoi orribili cerchi
o tempo infinito.

Ne approfitto anche per ricordare che quest'anno si celebrano i trent'anni dalla scomparsa del grande Maestro della Metafisica e una serie di mostre e iniziative sta animando la nostra penisola già a partire da questa primavera.

[by Mapi]

…
Passons passons puisque tout passe ..... Let’s go by, let’s go by, as everything go by
Je me retournerai souvent ...................... I will often look back
Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse ......... Memories are hunting horns
Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent. .......... Whose noise dies among wind

"Cors de Chasse" - Apollinaire

Yo la Tengo :

detouring-america-with-horns.mp3

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(apollinaire, various iterations | gare saint-lazare | sante)

Luc Sante is the Belgian American writer who wrote Low Life. This is his description of how a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire described perfectly his experience of leaving Belgium. The poem, however, does far more than address his identity as an immigrant: it is a clear revelation, a flash, of his place in the world that lays bare his desire for the clarity of modernity in the face of the confusion of religion. He comes to a point of exhilaration and comfort.

"A la fin tu est las de ce monde ancien."

"In the end you are tired of this old world." Thus began "Zone," by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin "Shepherdess o Eiffel Tower the flock of bridges is bleating this morning." The poem was speaking directly to me, to me alone, as proven on the second page: Voilà la jeune rue et tu n'es encore qu'un petit enfant / Ta mère ne t'habille que de bleu et de blanc. "Here is the young street and you are but a little child / Your mother only dresses you in blue and white," which was exactly true of my early childhood; that tu clinched it. Tu regardes les yeux pleins de larmes ces pauvres émigrants / Ils croient en Dieu ils prient les femmes allaitent des enfants / Ils emplissent de leur odeure le hall de la gare Saint-Lazare. "You look with your eyes filled with tears at the poor immigrants / They believe in God they pray the women suckle infants / They fill with their odor the hall of the Saint-Lazare station"—I had been there and seen that! Furthermore, the poem seemed to be about a yearning for modernity in the face of confusion as to the truth of religion, a clairvoyant depiction of my own central inner drama of the time. But there was more: the poem was fluid, rhyming but in an elastic meter like an improvised song, with phrases strung together without punctuation but always clear in their meaning, with an unlabored syntax close to conversational, with capitalized names like cherries in a box of chocolates, with sudden movements in time and space executed with a casual legerdemain, with a flash and whirl and continual surprise that was just what I wanted from the modern world but with a palpable kindness that reassured me as the poem flung me about.

~excerpted from French Without Tears, by Luc Sante

Letters are beautiful. I have no idea what attracted me so much to them—maybe a love for books, and the words on them. But it was more than that. I loved learning to write. The principal of our elementary school, who as I recall was rarely without a cigarette (and a drink, I learned later) did take time out of his day to teach the second graders handwriting.

He had lovely cursive writing, and I imitated his script, elegant as it was. But typefaces seemed so interesting, too. I wondered why we made letters the way we did. I have no idea why, but I experimented with it. Maybe a lot of kids do.

My mom noticed my interest, and in seventh grade, she bought me an Osmiroid fountain pen with exchangeable nibs, and a book on calligraphy. I tried. Not so great. I tried again. Still not great. I was fairly convinced that I could never figure it out, and put the kit away.

Summers as a kid with absolutely nothing to do are some combination of death and living. Boredom and freedom mix in such a way that after the excitement of not having to get up for school gets old, something has to happen or wars begin. For some reason, the summer after seventh grade, I decided not to fight my brother—maybe he had a lot of friends that year. Instead, I started riding my bike to the pool every night and swimming laps for an hour. I did this every night, and came home and had ice cream and wore sweatshirts in the air conditioning. Something about the chlorine and the monotony of going back and forth underwater was so satisfying. It was the perfect time to get the pens out, and I did.

I kept working at it, and finally found some success. My mom’s friend, who displayed her artwork occasionally, started hiring me to make signs. Other people ordered poems, sayings, documents of various sorts. I decided to be an artist. When I got to high school, we were fortunate enough to have eight separate art studios, and a full-year class of rotations to try out everything. I found that every other medium came as slowly to me as the calligraphy, but if it could be studied, I could usually develop some skill. Still, I always went back to the letters, switched pens, tried new methods, read more books, developed it. The papers I find now are glorious, the pens magnificent, the inks gorgeous. What a treat! It makes me want to buy sealing wax.

What made me enjoy calligraphy was not so much the product I made, although I did find great satisfaction in a well-accomplished feat. I loved the practice. I loved the repetition, the concentration that was necessary, but the appreciation for each and every contemplative stroke of the pen. It was something so beautiful, and it calmed me—a nervous preteen, then teenager—as much as the swimming did. I found myself not exactly thinking, mind wandering, when I was doing both these things, but simply present. Indeed, if I let myself think too much, I skipped a line, or a lane. I missed a letter or a word, or ran into a wall or another person. Many occupations have patron saints, but scribes get a demon: Titivillus, there to strike when attention wanders. I have never heard of such a thing for lap swimmers, but maybe it was not considered an occupation when the demons were getting their job assignments.

I tried Chinese calligraphy once, for maybe six classes. I loved it, but was lousy at that first attempt. I bought some brushes, an ink block, rice paper. Sumi-e had its method, bamboo, plum, but was in my twenties and didn’t have time for the requisite state of boredom to learn it well. There is something to be said for not being busy. Still, I enjoyed it, and just recently, I tried t'ai chi. It seemed similar, like drawing characters, moving brush on page, creating, and being.

It had been years since I took out my pens when I finally did. My skills now seem a bit rusty, but retrievable. I had forgotten the place the letters take me, the way things I copied became imprinted on my soul. For years, I pulled books off the shelves to find poems, and there were two I came to love in that time, both by Dylan Thomas. The anthology in the living room had “Fern Hill” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night…” Both poems remain, almost word for word, those words, words that in the latter I scarcely understood as I do now. My favorite to copy of the two was “Fern Hill,” with its varying line lengths, and the language, so beautiful. Then, later, when I learned more French, Apollinaire, “Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine/ Et nos amours...” More things I didn’t understand then, but stuck in my mind, still, as the letters still are and always will be.