MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Buzzati, Dino. Poem Strip [1969]. Translated by Marina Harss. NYRB, 2009. ISBN: 9781590173237. New York Review Books publishes quite a number of excellent novels, including one of my favorites Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau. This Italian comic from the 1969 is certainly a bit of an odd choice for them. Outside of the works themselves, [...]

Le Voyage brings on these thoughts. Baudoin is a wonderful visual stylist–his art is dynamic, engaging, lovely to behold–but his writing, or at least the story of this volume, is far less interesting, in fact it seems rather clichéd to me. Simon, the protagonist, one day leaves his wife, child, home, and job and starts off on a voyage. This flight is unplanned, rather at the breakfast table his head strangely opens up and starts showing images above it.

On the one hand, everyday life is to be castigated for its relentless monotony and deathly tedium. For instance in Nadja, Breton envisages everyday life as the vortex that will obliterate the marvellous: “She was sucked back into the whirlwind of ordinary life continuing around her and eager to force her, among other concessions, to [...]

All these are but memories that delude and inflame, all are desires of the night, but Georgette had understood that, to be beautiful and desired, she must identify herself with the night, with the quotidian mystery. Soupault, Philippe. Translated by William Carlos Williams. Last Nights of Paris. Exact Change, 1992. p.50. (my emphasis) Bonus quote: [...]

[See part 1] II. If Storeyville told a conventional narrative of search and discovery with a linear movement, clear characters, and distinct settings, then Chimera is decidedly unconventional, juxtaposing reality and dream, the everyday and the fantastic with a poetry that has the distinct feel of early 20th century Surrealism. At a basic level, reading [...]

[Morrissette paraphrases] …in modern fiction the plot becomes unimportant, assumes forms of pure convention, or disappears altogether. (257) André Breton’s movement has at least had the merit of expressing “La netteté anormale avec laquelle apparaissent, dans les rêves les plus anodins, une chaise, un caillou, une main, la chute d’un débris quelconque… comme si le [...]

In a search for the title and author of a particular book I remember reading about, I ended up in my copy of Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction by Ben Highmore (Routledge, 2002), where my skimming turned to pages on Surrealism (always a favorite for me): “Surrealism is about an effort, an energy, [...]

I’m currently reading The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema edited by Paul Hammond. In his introduction Hammond discusses the classic Surrealist film experience where they entered theatres randomly, watched a bit of a movie, and then moved on to another theater. Breton and company would move from one theater to the [...]

Dir. Jean Vigo (1934). This is wonderful romantic film that is quietly fantastic. The majority takes place on a river barge. Lots of flowing water. A few of the scenes are quite surreal. In one the protagonists, Jean and Juliette a newly married couple, are sleeping in separate beds far from each other. They simultaneously [...]

Babel by David B. (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2004). The majority of Andre Breton’s prose works (Nadja, Mad Love, Arcanum 17, etc.) mix autobiography, dream, myth, the everyday, chance — all elements of the Surrealist project: the exploration and exploitation of the unconscious for the purposes of art, culture, and even politics (like Freud the [...]