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( December 11th, 2011 )
Sex, alienation, existentialism… Alberto Moravia wrote Il Conformista in 1947, which was turned into a film twenty years later by Bernardo Bertolucci, and Il Disprezzo, or Contempt, in 1954 which was adapted by Jean-Luc Godard this time almost ten years later.
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( October 30th, 2011 )
Burn, bébé, burn! The most aptly named Blaise Cendrars has had no equal in modern literature when it comes to setting a page on fire. He chose his nouns the way pyromaniacs select their tinder, then ignited them with adjectives and verbs that spark like phosphor.
A teenage runaway, global nomad, soldier, and adventurer, Cendrars (1887-1961) lived an exuberant, incandescent existence, but it is the writing in his more than twenty books that threatens to singe the eyebrows of the timid observer.
It astounds me that Cendrars is not more widely read. Even in France he is these days ignored - and only Henry Miller, yours truly, and possibly Thomas Pynchon seem to have been directly influenced by him. I can but suppose that his oeuvre (ribald, funny, tough as iron, and bright as neon) is smoldering somewhere beneath the gray crust of general awareness, and will one day erupt into a flame around which every true lover of language and life cannot help but dance. Text by Tom Robbins for Hobo #13
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( September 8th, 2011 )
The perfect book to travel in France with. John Ashberry’s new translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Absolute modernity was for Rimbaud the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all life, the condition that nourishes poetry every second. The self is obsolete: In Rimbaud’s famous formulation, “I is someone else” (“Je est un autre”). In the twentieth century, the coexisting, conflicting views of objects that the Cubist painters cultivated, the equalizing deployment of all notes of the scale in serial music, and the unhierarchical progressions of bodies in motion in the ballets of Merce Cunningham are three examples among many of this fertile destabilization. Somewhat at the root of this, the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides, each an “intense and rapid dream,” in his words, is still emitting pulses. If we are absolutely modern - and we are - it’s because Rimbaud commended us to be. Photo Shawn Dogimont
TIME REGAINED. A CHRONICLE OF HOBO MAGAZINE'S DAYS...
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