June 28, 2009  

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Everything is fucked up, I'm dying of the pox[1]

In 1619, a collection of poems by different authors was published in Paris under the title: Parnasse satyrique. The star poet in the group was Théophile de Viau. The poem he published went like this:

Par le sieur Theophille

Philis tout est f… tu je meurs de la verolle

Elle exerce sur moi sa dernière rigueur :

Mon V. baisse la teste et n'a point de vigueur

un ulcére puant a gasté ma parole.

“Philis, everything is f..ed up; I’m dying of the pox

which has me strictly bound in the last throes;

My D..k hangs its head, is on the rocks

and a stinking sore spoils my attempts at prose.

I’m interested in Théophile as one of the early freethinkers who are separated by a degree or two from Gassendi. He is also, famously, one of the regrets of French literature – what if the French baroque had been allowed to flower, much as the English Jacobine writers were? There is a view, first expressed I believe by the romantics, that the imposition of rules of literary bienseance emptied French poetry of what Theophile called the “natural”. And that old fight isn’t worth fighting.

More interesting is that Théophile was put on trial for this poem, and nearly had the same fate doled out to him as to the Protestant printer, Etienne Dolet - who is, or should be, to translators what the skull is to the contemplating monk – for Dolet, poor guy, trying to convey a bit of Plato in French, translated a line in the Apology Apres le mort tu ne seras plus rien de tout, instead of tu ne seras plus, and so – for that rien - was burned at the stake. That is one way to ensure literalism!

There’s an amusing gloss on the enterprising use of ellipses and acronyms in obscene poems in Joan E. DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity, who claims that the startling thing about Theophile’s poem was the ‘cul’ – a vite as a V. or a foutre as a …tre was, in a sense, a bow to the common dignity, but that ass, stuck at the very end of the poem, it was practically mooning the authorities. I love these discussions that are close readings of readings – the third life’s life. They are so Nabokovian. DeJean introduces the topic like this:

“These four-letter words, primary obscenities, stand out as the principle mark of this bawdy poetry’s sexual transgressiveness. With one exception, cul (ass), which was to become key in Theophile’s case, they are never written out. Instead, in an act of self censorship that initially may have helped save the volumes from official prosecution, the words were abbreviated in various ways, and different types of punctuation were inserted to stand as a visual mark representing the suppressed content. This punctuation is the typographical equivalent of the fig leaves that began appearing in Renaissance engravings to veil male and female genitalia without fully hiding the contours.

The typographical fig leaves are, however, less efficient than their visual counterparts. A leaf painted on a representation of a human body means that the viewer, even though he or she obviously knows what presumably is there behyind the cover-up, is nevertheless denied the right to see the offending sexual characteristics. In the case of a text, however, a reader – and there is no reason to imagine that seventeenth century readers were any more conscious of these textual barriers than are their counterparts today – simply replaces the missing letters without a thought, so much so that he or she is immediately unaware that anything has been left out. This is truly the zero degree of censorship. Since, however, it obviously served an important function, I will consider it for a moment more.”

The Works of Théophile Gautier: The grotesques: François Villon, Théophile by Théophile Gautier, Frederick Caesar de Sumichrast

The Grotesques; Francois Villon, Theophile de Viau, Saint- Amant, Cyrano de Bergerac, George de Scudery, Paul Scarron

Key words and phrases

Paul Scarron, Cyrano de Bergerac, Saint-Amant, Typhon, FRANCOIS VILLON, Louis XIV, burlesque, Sejanus, GROTESQUES, poet, Pierre Corneille, Alaric, Vanino, Panurge, Alvaredo, Jupiter, Virgil, Hotel de Bourgogne, THEOPHILE GAUTIER, Enceladus

Le Parnasse satyrique du quinzieme siecle; anthologie de pieces libres (1905) by Marcel Schwob

Vierenhalf jaar later, op 18 augustus 1623, werd de dichter Théophile de Viau door het Franse parlement bij verstek veroordeeld tot de brandstapel. ...

Het is in deze maand september 300 jaar geleden dat de Franse dichter Théophile de Viau, slechts 36 jaar oud, ten gevolge van een koorts in de gevangenis opgelopen, stierf. Zijn vader was advocaat te Bordeaux, streng orthodox protestant en ijverend hugenoot.[2] DBNL . Martinus Nijhoff

"I find this unbearable and soon returned to insolence and erotic vomit" --Kirjasto (from The Guilty, 1988)

No island is an island: four glances at English literature in a world by Carlo Ginzburg mentions "Lucian's Opuscula, issued in Paris in June 1514, which included three additional, related pieces translated by Erasmus: Saturnalia, Cronosolon,

Marthe Blau, Florence Ehnuel

List of books and publications related to the hippie subculture

Stonewall riots @40[3]

The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between New York City police officers and groups of gay and transgender people that began during the early morning of June 28, 1969, and lasted several days. Also called the Stonewall Rebellion or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as gay and transgender people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police.

From the New York Times of June 29, 1969:

HUNDREDS OF YOUNG MEN WENT ON A RAMPAGE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plain-clothes men raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homo-sexual clientele.

Thirteen persons were arrested and four policemen injured. The young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen, who had a search warrant authorizing them in investigate reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar, the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square.--New York Times, June 29, 1969[4]

Except for Illinois, which decriminalized sodomy in 1961, homosexual acts, even between consenting adults acting in private homes, were a criminal offense in every U.S. state at the time the Stonewall Riots occurred: "An adult convicted of the crime of having sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years—or even life—in prison. In 1971, twenty states had 'sex psychopath' laws that permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, and [in] seven states they could be castrated." (Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, by David Carter, p. 15) Castration, emetics, hypnosis, electroshock therapy and lobotomies were used by psychiatrists to attempt to cure homosexuals through the 1950s and 1960s.(Katz, pp. 181–197.)(Adam, p. 60.)

Subsequent nightclubs, such as The Sanctuary, often billed as the first modern DJ-led nightclub of New York, epitomized the post-Stonewall era, "when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police." --Peter Braunstein

Sir Thomas Lawrence, Satan summoning his Legions, 1796-1797.

The Sound of Wonder on Finders Keepers Records.