'Adécédaire Malveillant'
Tony Duvert
(translated by Electric News Paper Boy)
-----
ANTIPREFACE
No, the aphorism is not an irreproachable literary genre. Its trim phrases always have something fat about them, and they share the lot of fat girls, or of boys with nothing but a fat cock: one gives in to them privately but does not acknowledge them publicly.
*
A collection of small opinions, remarks, ideas -- a catalogue of abusive
generalizations.
Of course, everything that can be said in terms of generalizations is
false: but it's also exciting, like a scandal. An act of revenge.
Capricious, slanderous, and spiteful: this is what you are. And you love
it.
*
Thought in the form of "collected thoughts" has something beastly about it.
-------------------------------
A
ABJECT
Many are the trials which reveal the abjectness of the magistrates
more than the faults of the accused.
*
I resign myself to the observation that the men I judge "abject"
resemble me entirely.
ADOPTION
It is as easy to beget as it is hard to adopt. Candidate parents for
adoption are chosen more carefully than future spouses, who will
nonetheless hold over their progeny the right to cruelty, violence, and
death.
The majority of the young left to their natural parents are forever
_lost_ children.
AIMER (to love)
You want to be loved "for yourself?" Then love a dying rich man.
*
The longest-lasting joy of love is that it comes to an end.
*
_He loves me_ means, in plain language, he accepts that I may capture
him, tame him, and violate him, and kill him, and bury him.
*
Every day people see somebody to love: but one must be loved in return,
and one judges one's self unworthy. Hence the rage for having children:
they're obliged to submit to you, without talking back, without
recourse. The law is against them; the law is for you.
*
For several years, they lived their lives together. Especially him.
*
Certain women indecently construct for themselves a virtue out of loving
(a _cordon bleu_ told me: "I dine with my heart, myself."). The word
"love" slurs through their lips like a case of menorrhagia.
Still, loving is as simple as hating: having ears and ears is enough.
Men, beasts -- they do it in silence.
No doubt these women must endlessly reassert that they love because they are incapable of doing so. They are centripetal.
*
The one story of love that touches me takes places between a lame duck
and a three-pawed dog, both barefoot tramps, frightful looking, filthy,
inseparable.
This couple is far, far removed from Tristan and Isolde -- more
evocative of Bouvard and Pécouchet.
The dog and the duck renounce the idea of playing their romance straight (after one absurd attempt).
*
In love, to say "yes" to someone is to offer him certain of the self's delicacies that one cannot one's self enjoy, but find good for him. He's then rather like an absurd antiques dealer who flushes upon witnessing a coveted or attic or cave:
-- I can take everything?
-- Yes, yes. Everything. You'll be relieving me of the burden.
Incredulous, he helps himself, and imagines stealing off with you, too.
*
Let the idiots go empty-handed.
We are inculcated with the false idea that mutual love is exceptional,
almost impossible. This lie discourages initiative, even though the
majority of attempts succeed. The adolescent dies of thirst in front of
a lake of potable water and, come of age, attaches himself to the worst
liaison without daring to seek out something better -- astonished that
any imitiation, filthy as it is, of such inaccessible happiness should
have dropped out of the sky at all.
*
The less you see yourself, the more you love yourself. If you've never
known yourself at all, you'll love yourself your whole life. That's what
I'd call success.
*
I sustain an incurable desire for certain beings who I didn't know how to approach or win over at the time, or who disappeared before I'd found enough joy in them. In revenge, those who did satisfy my hunger -- their equals, nevertheless -- I hardly think about at all. I've stashed their memory neatly away along with the junk and memorabilia I attach to them, perhaps for my old age, should it be surrounded by the untouchable.
*
To love someone: devouring his life with my eyes brings me consolation
over my own life. But to observe myself disgusts me: to contemplate it
is nothing but painful and scours me out of myself.
*
If we only ever loved with clarity, every man would be born, live, and
die alone.
AMBITION
To imitate nothing but the inimitable.
ANIMAL
The idealist delegates his animality to the men he debases. He eats beasts killed by brutes. He relegates to prostitutes the vices his morality and his wife condemn. He leaves his vanquished, his children, to the various functionaries of punishment. He throws out his refuse for those of humbler means to collect it again. He entrusts his dirty laundry, his tacky hair, his black fingernails, his fetid skin, his rotten teeth, his decaying organs, his impotent glands, his dead muscles, to a hundred slavish dirt-removers, drainers, doctors. It is others who pay him and cook for him whatever might appease his hunger and drunkenliness.
Relieved of the toils of the flesh, our humanist seeks angels and
masses, spiritual perfumes, medals, crosses, celestial arts. He wrinkles
his nose in disgust if he hears a crude word, if science attacks him, if
he reads any sort of realism. Toward such materialism he is indignant:
he's got a soul, he does.
*
The enormous number of pets that the French keep: one must give a eulogy for our good hearts.
What shit. The French keep dogs because they really don't like dogs.
ARGENT
I have a terrible tendency to ask for money from whoever says good
things about me.
*
Various apologists of old have demonstrated that in unhappiness --
sickness, marriage, but most of all poverty -- our friends abandon us.
(These authors, it appears, knew how to choose their relationships.)
But who am I to forget in times of prosperity? What hand held out to me will suddenly strike me as greedy? Money reveals who we were before we came to posses it: that's why one is wrong to condemn the wicked hearts of the rich. I myself do not have the means to cherish my vices; those made rich have the means of inflicting their own on me.
ARISTOCRAT
The silly bearing, narrow vulgarity, and grimacing platitudes of our
aristocrats, as pretty as herons crossed with sows. The newspaper in
their talons is written for withdrawn little prudes and the piss ladies
of the church -- O prince, behold your people!
ART
Art shapes the eye and the ear with which we perceive this supposed
reality from which we nonetheless say art is detached. A man without a
visual culture sees nothing.
ASSOUVIR (to appease)
It is not true that we struggle against the savageness of man when, in the manner of priests and police, we appease our own savageness in that struggle -- which always has cruelty as its means, and people as its victims.
AU DELA (the beyond)
The paradise of Christians would be hell for me. If their insupportable
god exists, he will thus condemn me to sit beside him
AUTEURS (authors)
To read but rarely my colleagues' books -- a butcher doesn't subsist on
sausage meat.
AUTORITÉ
Parental authority is the absolutism of physical force and of money. The
young don't like to admit it: parents keep nothing but affection and
obligation on their mouths, and -- without a single allusion to their
portfolios -- in their fists.
AVANCE (ahead, being ahead)
If you're ahead of your time, then tomorrow the imbeciles will adore you
at last.
AVOIR (to have)
Acquisition excites me like rape. Possession unsettles me; all is heavy.
The goods that stick with me are worthy of a magpie's nest: a bed,
meaningless scraps -- photos, writings, the sounds of voices.
AVORTEMENT (abortion)
Priests do not beget children: they order you to beget them for them.
Thus the pill and legal abortion have emptied the seminaries.
In other times, in every large family there was always one weakling, cripple, or cretin; the priests took them in, and the Church prospered. Nowadays, the people don't have enough children to throw any of them to the crows, and the Church dies.
p.s. As most of you have probably heard by now, the French students’ ongoing protests and disruptions have paid off. Yesterday, Chirac’s government finally caved in under their pressure and killed the new employment law. Obviously, a great little victory, and I can only hope that the news filters over to the US in such a way that American students will take note that making a lot of noise and causing a lot of problems is still a very effective way to fight the power. ** Mv, Speed dating is curious, hm. I’ll look for your Elliot related pix with pleasure. ** Try me, ‘Under the Bushes, Under the Stars’ is probably my favorite GBV album too, if I have to choose one. And you know I’m going to tell you to get ‘Compound Eye’ already. On the writing shite front, my advice is don’t throw the shite away. Put it in a file or something. I’ve written stuff I thought was hopeless only to look at it a year or whatever later suddenly seeing the good in it and knowing exactly how to fix it. Unless you’re absolutely sure it’s worthless, store that stuff. ** Friendlier, Will do. A DVD copy of part pf the documentary is on its way to me. I’m so curious. ** Paul curran, I so wish there could be a stage 3 that I’ve been resisting the announcement that it won’t happen, but, sad to say, the book is already so big that I’m going to have to figure out a design/typeface that’ll bring it in under Akashic’s size limits. So no, there won’t be, but there will be other projects where I hope to be able to not only carefully read but support the work of the writers posting here who arrived later than others. ** Thomas, No, amazingly, all the papers at the conference were new. Sometimes I just can’t believe my luck, you know? Oh, the screening of the ‘I Apologize’ film was kind of a disaster. The DVD was seriously fucked up, so about halfway through the piece it started pixilating and freezing wildly then froze dead. So you didn’t miss much. ** You, Great, thanks for the revision. I’ll watch for it. BTW, I should be starting the hands on editing with writers very soon. ** Mikel motorcycle, The guy in the sweater and suspenders is one Pierre-Louis Patoline, a lovely and brilliant French Canadian dude currently living in Paris, and, I think, a reader of this blog so … busted! ** Statictick & measdisease, Thank you so much, you guys. We’ll sort it out and confer. Yeah, maybe you guys can work together on it, as misdisease suggests? ** Maximum etc., That is such a rich report it really is painful to hear about, in a good way I mean. That Ashbery retrospective reading … total dream come true. It’s sad to hear about James Tate. I’ve heard he’s been ill. He was a huge, huge favorite of mine when I was first writing poems, especially the ‘Oblivion Ha-Ha’ and ‘Absences’ period, and is still a hero to me. Anyway, you lucky fucking dog, thank you. It must have been visually/aurally documented, right? There’s still hope. ** David ehrenstein, Yeah, sorry to be slow in reading/responding to your autobio piece. I’m really close to catching up to the point where I can dive into it. ** C., That ‘Scanner Darkly’ style animation would work really well. It’s true, isn’t it? Film producers, take note. Thanks, sweet c. ** Corpodibacco, Well, I think Melissa P is real. I hung out with her a fair amount in Rome, and … well, I guess I’m not the world’s most reliable judge of these things, but she seemed real. BTW, the Italy election seems like a big, disappointing mess as of this morning. True? ** Allright, a ton of text for you today, so I’ll let you go.
Tony Duvert
(translated by Electric News Paper Boy)
-----
ANTIPREFACE
No, the aphorism is not an irreproachable literary genre. Its trim phrases always have something fat about them, and they share the lot of fat girls, or of boys with nothing but a fat cock: one gives in to them privately but does not acknowledge them publicly.
*
A collection of small opinions, remarks, ideas -- a catalogue of abusive
generalizations.
Of course, everything that can be said in terms of generalizations is
false: but it's also exciting, like a scandal. An act of revenge.
Capricious, slanderous, and spiteful: this is what you are. And you love
it.
*
Thought in the form of "collected thoughts" has something beastly about it.
-------------------------------
A
ABJECT
Many are the trials which reveal the abjectness of the magistrates
more than the faults of the accused.
*
I resign myself to the observation that the men I judge "abject"
resemble me entirely.
ADOPTION
It is as easy to beget as it is hard to adopt. Candidate parents for
adoption are chosen more carefully than future spouses, who will
nonetheless hold over their progeny the right to cruelty, violence, and
death.
The majority of the young left to their natural parents are forever
_lost_ children.
AIMER (to love)
You want to be loved "for yourself?" Then love a dying rich man.
*
The longest-lasting joy of love is that it comes to an end.
*
_He loves me_ means, in plain language, he accepts that I may capture
him, tame him, and violate him, and kill him, and bury him.
*
Every day people see somebody to love: but one must be loved in return,
and one judges one's self unworthy. Hence the rage for having children:
they're obliged to submit to you, without talking back, without
recourse. The law is against them; the law is for you.
*
For several years, they lived their lives together. Especially him.
*
Certain women indecently construct for themselves a virtue out of loving
(a _cordon bleu_ told me: "I dine with my heart, myself."). The word
"love" slurs through their lips like a case of menorrhagia.
Still, loving is as simple as hating: having ears and ears is enough.
Men, beasts -- they do it in silence.
No doubt these women must endlessly reassert that they love because they are incapable of doing so. They are centripetal.
*
The one story of love that touches me takes places between a lame duck
and a three-pawed dog, both barefoot tramps, frightful looking, filthy,
inseparable.
This couple is far, far removed from Tristan and Isolde -- more
evocative of Bouvard and Pécouchet.
The dog and the duck renounce the idea of playing their romance straight (after one absurd attempt).
*
In love, to say "yes" to someone is to offer him certain of the self's delicacies that one cannot one's self enjoy, but find good for him. He's then rather like an absurd antiques dealer who flushes upon witnessing a coveted or attic or cave:
-- I can take everything?
-- Yes, yes. Everything. You'll be relieving me of the burden.
Incredulous, he helps himself, and imagines stealing off with you, too.
*
Let the idiots go empty-handed.
We are inculcated with the false idea that mutual love is exceptional,
almost impossible. This lie discourages initiative, even though the
majority of attempts succeed. The adolescent dies of thirst in front of
a lake of potable water and, come of age, attaches himself to the worst
liaison without daring to seek out something better -- astonished that
any imitiation, filthy as it is, of such inaccessible happiness should
have dropped out of the sky at all.
*
The less you see yourself, the more you love yourself. If you've never
known yourself at all, you'll love yourself your whole life. That's what
I'd call success.
*
I sustain an incurable desire for certain beings who I didn't know how to approach or win over at the time, or who disappeared before I'd found enough joy in them. In revenge, those who did satisfy my hunger -- their equals, nevertheless -- I hardly think about at all. I've stashed their memory neatly away along with the junk and memorabilia I attach to them, perhaps for my old age, should it be surrounded by the untouchable.
*
To love someone: devouring his life with my eyes brings me consolation
over my own life. But to observe myself disgusts me: to contemplate it
is nothing but painful and scours me out of myself.
*
If we only ever loved with clarity, every man would be born, live, and
die alone.
AMBITION
To imitate nothing but the inimitable.
ANIMAL
The idealist delegates his animality to the men he debases. He eats beasts killed by brutes. He relegates to prostitutes the vices his morality and his wife condemn. He leaves his vanquished, his children, to the various functionaries of punishment. He throws out his refuse for those of humbler means to collect it again. He entrusts his dirty laundry, his tacky hair, his black fingernails, his fetid skin, his rotten teeth, his decaying organs, his impotent glands, his dead muscles, to a hundred slavish dirt-removers, drainers, doctors. It is others who pay him and cook for him whatever might appease his hunger and drunkenliness.
Relieved of the toils of the flesh, our humanist seeks angels and
masses, spiritual perfumes, medals, crosses, celestial arts. He wrinkles
his nose in disgust if he hears a crude word, if science attacks him, if
he reads any sort of realism. Toward such materialism he is indignant:
he's got a soul, he does.
*
The enormous number of pets that the French keep: one must give a eulogy for our good hearts.
What shit. The French keep dogs because they really don't like dogs.
ARGENT
I have a terrible tendency to ask for money from whoever says good
things about me.
*
Various apologists of old have demonstrated that in unhappiness --
sickness, marriage, but most of all poverty -- our friends abandon us.
(These authors, it appears, knew how to choose their relationships.)
But who am I to forget in times of prosperity? What hand held out to me will suddenly strike me as greedy? Money reveals who we were before we came to posses it: that's why one is wrong to condemn the wicked hearts of the rich. I myself do not have the means to cherish my vices; those made rich have the means of inflicting their own on me.
ARISTOCRAT
The silly bearing, narrow vulgarity, and grimacing platitudes of our
aristocrats, as pretty as herons crossed with sows. The newspaper in
their talons is written for withdrawn little prudes and the piss ladies
of the church -- O prince, behold your people!
ART
Art shapes the eye and the ear with which we perceive this supposed
reality from which we nonetheless say art is detached. A man without a
visual culture sees nothing.
ASSOUVIR (to appease)
It is not true that we struggle against the savageness of man when, in the manner of priests and police, we appease our own savageness in that struggle -- which always has cruelty as its means, and people as its victims.
AU DELA (the beyond)
The paradise of Christians would be hell for me. If their insupportable
god exists, he will thus condemn me to sit beside him
AUTEURS (authors)
To read but rarely my colleagues' books -- a butcher doesn't subsist on
sausage meat.
AUTORITÉ
Parental authority is the absolutism of physical force and of money. The
young don't like to admit it: parents keep nothing but affection and
obligation on their mouths, and -- without a single allusion to their
portfolios -- in their fists.
AVANCE (ahead, being ahead)
If you're ahead of your time, then tomorrow the imbeciles will adore you
at last.
AVOIR (to have)
Acquisition excites me like rape. Possession unsettles me; all is heavy.
The goods that stick with me are worthy of a magpie's nest: a bed,
meaningless scraps -- photos, writings, the sounds of voices.
AVORTEMENT (abortion)
Priests do not beget children: they order you to beget them for them.
Thus the pill and legal abortion have emptied the seminaries.
In other times, in every large family there was always one weakling, cripple, or cretin; the priests took them in, and the Church prospered. Nowadays, the people don't have enough children to throw any of them to the crows, and the Church dies.
p.s. As most of you have probably heard by now, the French students’ ongoing protests and disruptions have paid off. Yesterday, Chirac’s government finally caved in under their pressure and killed the new employment law. Obviously, a great little victory, and I can only hope that the news filters over to the US in such a way that American students will take note that making a lot of noise and causing a lot of problems is still a very effective way to fight the power. ** Mv, Speed dating is curious, hm. I’ll look for your Elliot related pix with pleasure. ** Try me, ‘Under the Bushes, Under the Stars’ is probably my favorite GBV album too, if I have to choose one. And you know I’m going to tell you to get ‘Compound Eye’ already. On the writing shite front, my advice is don’t throw the shite away. Put it in a file or something. I’ve written stuff I thought was hopeless only to look at it a year or whatever later suddenly seeing the good in it and knowing exactly how to fix it. Unless you’re absolutely sure it’s worthless, store that stuff. ** Friendlier, Will do. A DVD copy of part pf the documentary is on its way to me. I’m so curious. ** Paul curran, I so wish there could be a stage 3 that I’ve been resisting the announcement that it won’t happen, but, sad to say, the book is already so big that I’m going to have to figure out a design/typeface that’ll bring it in under Akashic’s size limits. So no, there won’t be, but there will be other projects where I hope to be able to not only carefully read but support the work of the writers posting here who arrived later than others. ** Thomas, No, amazingly, all the papers at the conference were new. Sometimes I just can’t believe my luck, you know? Oh, the screening of the ‘I Apologize’ film was kind of a disaster. The DVD was seriously fucked up, so about halfway through the piece it started pixilating and freezing wildly then froze dead. So you didn’t miss much. ** You, Great, thanks for the revision. I’ll watch for it. BTW, I should be starting the hands on editing with writers very soon. ** Mikel motorcycle, The guy in the sweater and suspenders is one Pierre-Louis Patoline, a lovely and brilliant French Canadian dude currently living in Paris, and, I think, a reader of this blog so … busted! ** Statictick & measdisease, Thank you so much, you guys. We’ll sort it out and confer. Yeah, maybe you guys can work together on it, as misdisease suggests? ** Maximum etc., That is such a rich report it really is painful to hear about, in a good way I mean. That Ashbery retrospective reading … total dream come true. It’s sad to hear about James Tate. I’ve heard he’s been ill. He was a huge, huge favorite of mine when I was first writing poems, especially the ‘Oblivion Ha-Ha’ and ‘Absences’ period, and is still a hero to me. Anyway, you lucky fucking dog, thank you. It must have been visually/aurally documented, right? There’s still hope. ** David ehrenstein, Yeah, sorry to be slow in reading/responding to your autobio piece. I’m really close to catching up to the point where I can dive into it. ** C., That ‘Scanner Darkly’ style animation would work really well. It’s true, isn’t it? Film producers, take note. Thanks, sweet c. ** Corpodibacco, Well, I think Melissa P is real. I hung out with her a fair amount in Rome, and … well, I guess I’m not the world’s most reliable judge of these things, but she seemed real. BTW, the Italy election seems like a big, disappointing mess as of this morning. True? ** Allright, a ton of text for you today, so I’ll let you go.
posted by Dennis Cooper at 1:14 AM
14 Comments:
No problem, didn't want to pressure you. Thanks for clearing it up.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
** Mv, Speed dating is curious, hm. I’ll look for your Elliot related pix with pleasure. **
here is the link for the Elliot pics:
http://branded-youth.livejournal.com
Let me know what you think. m.v.
measdisease, I'd love to collaborate on this. I guess it all hinges on what sort of timing we have to do it. I had the grander visions of something interactive that resembles yours. Then I reduced those, just in case (if you know what I mean). You can contact me at njrhoades@yahoo.com, or nrhoades@comcast.net. I was going to work with a couple of experimental filmmakers in the Detroit area that I know. So, let's discuss soon. Thanks.
I just checked up on ABEBOOKS.COM, and the grove edition of his book published by Grove is being sold for over a $100.00. So you hit upon a real rareity. What you put on the blog reminds me of Cioran. Not in theme, but just that tight highly poetic sentence structure without the crap. Hardboiled touches.
I'm interested in how you discovered his work. As you can tell I am intrigued by his writing. Plus the fact that he's sort of mysterious is another reason for me to be interested in him.
Is his books still in print in France?
a better Elliot link:
http://www.marcvallee.co.uk/elliot.html
Here's a Tony Duvert film credit
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1904460/
The excerpt you posted reads a lot like Barthes' posthumously published "Incidents."
There's much about Duvert in the late (lamented) journal "Masques" (which I always thought of as a French attempt at "Little Caesar")
What a great post - Duvert's work is fascinating. Bravo for the new translation. This is a real service considering the rarity of his work, esp. since his Grove novel is OOP and selling for such big bucks. Maybe some small press will want to bring it back in print and/or publish some of his other works in English. Maybe a project for Little House on the Bowery to consider? A Duvert reader perhaps?
And Dennis, I just emailed you a revised - and shortened - version of my contribution to Userlands. You should get it soon.
thank you for introducing me to tony duvert...some of the stuff posted here is really killer material...
for some reason his work reminds me of some of rene char's work...not sure why...
--andrew
Just got "When Jonathan Died" at the library after reading Duvert's translated pieces here. Looks like I will indeed enjoy the hell out of this novel.
There is a picture of Duvert included on the dust jacket of "Strange Landscape." He looks like an old literature professor of mine.
Thanks for the hook up.
would you ever have a child?
Sup'
this maybe old news but
Cooper mentioned on Xiu Xiu Pitchfork interview http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/x/xiu-xiu-06/
PS
porcelain skull - your art at Cork was awesome esp. the piece featuring John Robinson aka that kid from Elephant.
Did intend to say hi and have a drink with the bloggers but I was just so frickin tired n wasted.
Holy exquisite hell, these are wonderful aphorisms. Tony Duvert, where have you been all my life? I thought I was doomed to his anti-humanist boredom, but then I found an eloquent animal in the desert and it stuffed me full of the terror the mind must have inspired in the first days of its creation. These passages are like a sphinx, half fury and half indolence. How does one answer? Maybe he is like Rene Cahr, for whom the night is so langorous its hours can be braided into a kind of pliant honey. Thank you for this wonderful post.
Wow, Dennis, thanks so much for the Duvert day (and the promise of more) and to Mr News Boy too for the translation. I've been trudging that lonely Duvert google search path for ages and coming up with almost nothing - and wading through a french copy of one of his books and probably missing 50% of it in the process. I came across first mention of him in footnotes and the occasional paragraph in the 'literature' of gay literature and have been trying to find more ever since. Just a thought but if there are ANY of his books still or only recently out of print I wonder if his french publishers know where to find him and would forward a note? I would have thought it's likely he's heard of you and might respond?
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