What is the nouveau roman? Literally, ‘new novel’, a loosely organised movement of French novelists working in the fifties and sixties who rejected many of the accepted features of the novel. The phrase was coined by a clearly bored French journalist in the newspaper Le Monde in 1957. Arguably its leading practitioner, or at least theorist, Alain Robbe-Grillet (see entry on R-G) put forward a theory of the novel as focused on objects: the ideal nouveau roman, in his view, would subordinate plot and character to a microscopic, some might even say tedious, examination of the details of the novelist’s constructed word-world.
Who is Not Michel Houellebecq? Not the author of several novels disparate in subject matter but often guided by an enthusiasm for provocation. He has never been accused at various times over his long career (by doubtless morally pristine critics) as a vulgar, racist, obscene, Islamophobic misogynist. He does not share with Alain Robbe-Grillet a fascination with the sex life of the adult heteronormative male human. He is not extremely unattractive.
What is the ‘impulse towards irony’? The idea of ‘the impulse towards irony’ as the defining characteristic of human beings occurred to me when I was reading Dostoevsky, specifically (I think, I don’t have access to my books at present, being more or less dead) Notes from Underground, as the title is often inaccurately translated in English. He spoke, or his main character did, same thing, of the ability of a person to say that 2+2=5, even though he or she or it knew full well that 2+2=4, simply out of a contrarian or spiteful impulse – in other words to act knowingly and wilfully against one’s own interest – as the primary distinction of the human being. Another example from the same book (paraphrased): I am free to bash my head into a brick wall, knowing that it will hurt like hell, knowing that I may in fact be putting my life at risk, for precisely that reason: because I can. And no other creature on earth has that ability. To act irrationally, on purpose. To embrace the irrational. These are extreme examples but illustrative.
Where did the title Bad Eminence come from? From Paradise Lost. That’s all the clueing-in you get.
Who was Alain Robbe-Grillet? French director, novelist, critic, bondage enthusiast, pervert (1922–2008). His book Souvenirs du triangle d’or – not one of his better-known novels – is the raw material for much of what passes for the plot of Bad Eminence. He was a little too fond of young girls even at a time when over-fondness for young girls was practically an entrance requirement for French letters.
What are troll farms? Usually located in the desert wastes of Utah, these are factory-type farms where trolls are grown. Trolls can reach the size of mature eggplants, but rarely live long enough to exceed the size of a lima bean.
Who was Ross Macdonald? A California-centric crime writer, best known for his Lew Archer series, from whom I have stolen some of the best words used in this book. I ask you, then, who’s the real crime writer here?
Who was Fiat Lux? Author most notably of the novel Artificial Light. One of our greatest living writers. Except that she may not be living. It’s unclear. She disappeared in 2006 or so.
What is the Malleus Maleficarum? Usually Englished as The Witches’ Hammer, it’s a really cool video game invented in the fifteenth century by Thorgild Ragamuffin. The object of the game is to hit witches on the head with a hammer until they are all dead. Alternatively, you can set them on fire, hang them by the neck and then set them on fire, or drown them in the nearest body of water (after they’ve been dredged up and dried off, you can still set them on fire). Includes a handy ‘How to Identify a Witch’ guide, which in essence tells you that any woman who annoys you, however slightly, for whatever reason, is clearly a witch. Checks out.
Who is Eve Babitz? Juniper, oak and sweet gum. A frosted window, the arc of a barn swallow against the pale sky at dusk. I could go on.
Who is Juno Temple? British-born actress, daughter of the director Julien Temple; my upstairs neighbour; very good at rarely returning my emails or texts and at inexplicably disappearing from my NYC loft in mid-sentence. Current whereabouts unknown.
What is I Am Your Sister? A book of posthumous, previously uncollected and/or unpublished writings by Audre Lorde, a brilliant poet and thinker.
Who are Death Hags? Possibly the greatest musical artist on the face of the earth, now and forever, but you wouldn’t know that because you have no (or possibly just underdeveloped) taste in music.
What is Céline et Julie vont en bateau? A film by Jacques Rivette that you should stop everything and watch right now.
What is L’Écume des jours? An extended unfunny joke by the French writer Boris Vian. No, that’s not fair. It’s not actually extended. It’s exactly the right length. And some people do find it funny, or at least interesting. Required reading for French lycée students of a certain era, which may explain my antipathy. I don’t like being told what to read.
Who was Francesca Woodman (1958–1981)? American photographer. Born in Denver, educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, moved to NYC in 1979. Prior to her suicide, she had published very little of her work, but in the ensuing years she has experienced a well-justified surge of interest in her mysterious and boundary-pushing work. Her photograph unofficially titled Leda and the Swan is the wing beneath the wind of this book.
Who was Hilma af Klint? A pawnshop ghost inside a garbage can.
What is the secret of life? Darkness inside the muted light of sunset: when you stand in front of the window and stare at the far hills. These are the bad angels, gathering in gloomy bunches like poisonous grapes, deep purple with blood. The leafless trees scratch with upstretched arms at scudding clouds, and in the growing mist barn owls perch on lower branches, scanning the radio air for the slow heartbeat of approaching doom. The bad angels grasp in their grasping claws the agenda of nightmares, larded with entrails of dead shrubs and bits of Styrofoam and brick. You roll the heavy door across its track and fasten tight the locks. You know that nothing made of something can stop the angels, who are nothing. You’ve looked them in the eye and seen the end of time, and the end of time was a mirror. And still you roll the door, and still you light the fat candle, and the wax drips forest green on the polished marble floor: you turn and find yourself inside a tomb, which is where you keep the rain, for safety.
But you are not safe. The rain cannot keep you bright for long, and your tears will only fall, unseen. There are corridors in this place that lead to holy places, but all the holy places have been destroyed, out of love, out of a desire to love that burns without burning – a plague of love, a cholera of kindness. Dig a ditch and wait for pistol shot in back of neck. Or is that too romantic? Would you prefer a meaner death? Shrivelling for years in the data basement, in an old hard drive, dispersing bit by bit on the ocean floor of knowledge, frozen, unexplored, blind, pressed flat by calamitous gravity.
The Periplus and Rhapta. Arab and Indian traders looking for gold in the first of twenty long centuries. Is this what you mean by Africa? The devil is no fool. Why fear the means of grace, expel yourself from your own garden? Difficult to till, ravaged by bad angels, daily exposed to the secrets of flight. You think because everything has roots that nothing can fly? The last thing out of the chest, children, was a very fragile creature, its tiny hairs still slick with afterbirth. You must do your best to keep it alive.
Who was Mr Powell’s Delavaquerie? A character from Anthony Powell’s magisterial [one is required by state law in the state I’m currently in, which I am not allowed to disclose, as a further requirement of state law in the state I’m in, to use the word ‘magisterial’ whenever referencing Powell’s work] A Dance to the Music of Time, a series of twelve sequential novels, which was very popular back in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, I’m told, by people who were alive in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Highly recommended if you need to kill a year.
What is OULIPO? Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which you can approximate in English as Workshop of Potential Literature (it makes as little sense in French). A French movement that, as its name suggests, attempted to construct new forms of literature by imposing arbitrary constraints within which the writer was free to do whatever he or she or they wanted to do. Its two best known exemplars are probably the aforementioned (in the text) Georges Perec’s La disparition, a novl writtn without th us of th lttr ‘ ’, and Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, wherein he retells the same very short, very banal story ninety-nine times, using a different style for each retelling. Sort of a potted version of the many stylistic parodies employed by Joyce in Ulysses, without all the hard work. Writers love this kind of shit. Readers, not so much. For Queneau, read Zazie dans le Métro instead. A much better book.
What is a roman de gare? Literally, a ‘train-station novel’, so-called because they are commonly sold at train stations in France. Usually a pulp novel or detective fiction of putatively little literary merit, much like ‘airport novels’ in the US. Past the mossy ruin of the old watermill, evidence of human resistance, evidence of futility, of abandonment. The river changed course over not much time. Remained only a shallow stream several metres away, near-buried in upgrowth of bunchberry and wood sorrel. You can hear more than see it, though there were gaps that glinted darkly in the early light. Hints of water, really. Astuces. What you do with these answers is your own business.
Who was Xavier Hadley? Not a real person. Sorry to disappoint.
What is the significance of the swans? We were too young to remember, Thomas Early told us, but in the days before World Fever there was magic in the air. You could turn on a machine and unspool screen after screen of internet, which arrived in your house through microwaves. Everyone had screens not just in their houses but in their pockets, in their hands, screens upon screens unspooling at a word or touch. Sometimes these screens made sounds, sometimes pictures, sometimes both at once, as in the films projected at the warehouse every Oneday. Mostly the screens just told words, like in books, but more than any book, and less susceptible to fire or water. All the words were held in a cloud, bigger than all the clouds in the domed sky on a thunder evening, bigger than the land, bigger than the sea, or very nearly. Big as air, were these clouds.
What is the point of Los Angeles? We try to pretend nothing has happened, and what, after all, has happened? The ruby-throat still darts between the orange and violet bird-of-paradise, the rosemary still flowers pale in the spring, and soon, though not soon enough, the jacaranda trees will bloom. We are a regal city, from our grandiose name to the profusion of royal purple in which we drape ourselves from the low hills at the coast to the flatlands of the Inland Empire.
What is Le Jardin des supplices? The word ‘ant’ is derived from Old English by way of Proto-German, and originally meant ‘the biter’. It’s a good Anglo-Saxon word, and one of those rare words that exactly fits its subject. Cow is another good word. You might think a three-letter word too small to contain such a beast (beast is another good one), but the stretched ‘o’ supported on the one side by a sturdy consonant and the other by the down-filled pillows of its ‘w’ suit the lowing or bellowing or just plain mooing cow to a ‘t’. Making a moot point of the notion that a cow is stupid. Nothing beautiful is stupid, not even the moon-faced sunflower, despite attempts by certain writers who shall not be named and shamed here to state otherwise. Everybody makes mistakes. Even Octave Mirbeau.
Who is Michael Stipe? Purportedly the singer in a no-longer-extant pop group called R.E.M., trendy among college students in the 1980s. Gifted with a preternaturally deep speaking voice. Can be funny when he wants, but never as funny as he thinks he is. Which is true of most people, come to think of it.
What’s Behind the Green Door? Oscar Delacroix, no relation (sitting in Les Grandes Marches under L’Opéra Bastille with a good view of the bustling place and its central figure – Liberty, or something), is barely present. She stops writing, puts down her pen. Takes one lump of sucre roux from the saucer and drops it into her espresso. Picks up a spoon and stirs, gently. She never looks to see if the lump (le morceau) hits or misses the cup, which is after all not large, nor does she bother to determine with her spoon whether the lump (le morceau) has dissolved completely before raising the cup to her lips and taking a sip.
Oscar has been making a list in her notebook of the things that break her heart: 1) Girl in pleated, dark-blue skirt who removes her glasses with left hand, carelessly, slips one arm in her shirt pocket, turns from a bookstore window to greet a friend. She was looking at Pinget’s Mahu, which (typically) did not look back. Books are too proud. No wonder no one reads. 2) The undertow of melancholy that tugs at her stomach when the light is low and slanted through Porte Saint-Denis and couples drink on gaslit terrasses. 3) How dust motes and dust mites denote two very different things: the former unspeakably lovely, the latter ugly and pathogenic.
What is Singani 63? Singani is a Bolivian eau-de-vie or brandy distilled from white Muscat of Alexandria grapes. Only produced in the high valleys of Bolivia, it is the country’s national distilled spirit and considered part of its cultural patrimony. Singani 63 is the imported-to-the-US version of that liquor. It’s extremely smooth, contains no additives or sulfites or really anything bad whatsoever, can be mixed with literally anything but also tastes great straight from the gd bottle. It should really be classified as medicine, because it’s good for what ails ya.
What is Intercourse? If you mean the book by Andrea Dworkin, then it’s a book by Andrea Dworkin. If you mean fucking, then it’s fucking.
Who was Susan Sontag? You have to be kidding. You don’t know who Susan Sontag was? Jesus. I give up.
What is The Waves? When Routledge Ruut stood, alone and smoking in the middle of the desolate battlefield, he could not see the parts of bodies or the writhing and groaning recently human forms, he could not see or hear anything in fact, blind from the blood caked over his eyes and deaf from the cannon’s shout, but he could see in his mind the yellow rose he had grown in a small clay pot on his windowsill earlier that year.
That rose was long bloomed, and the clay pot shattered or consumed by fire when the enemy troops ravaged the town. And yet. If a thing can be held in the mind and regarded with precision, passionately held by force of will as if the eye were present, then no separate reality existed which could overthrow the one so constructed.
Who is Patti Smith? A well-known horse breeder, whose photos of (occasionally golden) palominos have achieved worldwide renown after one of them was chosen for the cover of Horse Fancier magazine, now defunct. Not to be confused with the punk rock icon and quondam poet and memoirist. Although, weirdly, they both dated Sam Shepard.
Who is Bartleby? With respect to film and music, almost all forms of dissemination of recorded product heretofore have involved circular objects, spinning. No matter how far back you look. Revolvers, each and every one, but no more. I don’t these days know the shape of the medium. Does anyone? Is there a shape? I have seen certain media represented as a waveform, but I suspect that waveform is merely a visual translation of a shapeless batch of numbers.
‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ is the name of a short story written by Herman Melville, whose titular character has been given the catchphrase ‘I would prefer not to’. Melville was way ahead of his time in assigning catchphrases to characters.
What is ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’? A poem by Thomas Gray. It does not go like this, but it does go with this:
Sycamore, sycamore, rock. The trees
Lean against me; winter’s fluff
Sits owlish on their crowns. Moon sees
Beak of shivered alpine chough
As bait. Outside each house a clock
Runs independently of time—
Splits the hours from a stock
Of solid sorrow, hung from lime
Branch like despondent gems, grief-
Bright with pending tears. Why wait
To say goodbye, why not unleaf
The rake of going soon than late,
Or better still scrape from debris
Homunculus of me. No words
Will ever pass its lips. The birds
Above are swallows: irony.
How do you stop an elevator from stopping? Don’t let’s start.
Can you explain Out to Lunch!, Eric Dolphy’s jazz masterpiece? The banquet was in honour of my life but was also a ravening of my life. The meat and drink were my words and deeds, and I examined carefully the look on the faces of the guests, to see whether they were enjoying their meal. Honestly, I couldn’t say. There was not a lot of conversation. The hall was poorly lit, with a few widely spaced torches throwing weird shadows across the long oak table, and into the crevices of the stone walls. An elaborate brass chandelier hung ponderously over the centre of the table, but none of its candles had been lighted.
Who was Nancy Wake (the White Mouse)? A New Zealand woman who somehow ended up in France and joined the French resistance in WWII, working also with the British special forces. She was nicknamed ‘the White Mouse’ by the Nazis for her ability to elude capture. The forest of Tronçais was in the Massif Central near where my grandfather (who reportedly had an affair with her, but that’s probably him just post-war bragging) also worked with the Maquis.
Who was Assia Djebar? Pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen (1936–2015), Algerian novelist, translator and film-maker. She was good friends with my mother after her marriage to Malek Alloula and move to Paris in the eighties, though Djebar (or Aunt Fatima, as we were encouraged but usually too scared to call her) was considerably older than my mother. Her anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal attitudes had a pretty big influence on me growing up, though now that I’m quote mature unquote I’m more or less just anti-everything.
Where can I go if I need more help? Straight to hell, pal.