By Rimbaud.
I
You’re not serious, when you’re seventeen.
– One fine evening, tired of beers and lemonade,
The noisy cafés with their dazzling gleam!
– You walk the lime-trees’ green on the Parade.
The lime-trees smell so fine on fine June evenings!
The air’s so sweet sometimes you close your eyes:
The wind is full of sounds – the town’s nearby –
Blows the smell of beer, and the scent of vines…
The New Inquiry on Futurist dining.
In a room whose walls are lined with aluminum, nimble waiters flit past diners, spritzing the air with perfume. A Wagner opera blares from a phonograph somewhere hidden. On each table sit four plates, each containing a small morsel. A quarter of a fennel bulb occupies the first, a single olive the second, the third holds a minute pile of candied fruit, and the fourth, a “tactile device” of red damask, velvet, and sandpaper, which the diners fondle as they eat.
n+1 on experimental film, Jeanne Dielman.
Chantal Akerman has given countless interviews. In most of these, even the most recent ones, she is still asked about Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, her canonical 1975 film that she made when she was only 25. Her responses have shifted over the course of decades, and at times you can sense her irritation at the continual fascination with her youth; in a 2010 interview, she snapped back to a question about watching Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, long cited as a life-changing experience for Akerman: “Oh, I have said that a hundred times. Forget about it. You know all about that. I have told that story one million times.”
Rob Doyle is an Irish short story writer and essayist. His novel, Here Are the Young Men, debuts later this year. Taking its name from a Joy Division track, it is, for want of a better description, a coming of age story that depicts the darker side of Dublin. Talking to the Irish Times, Rob described his “strong urge to write about atrocity porn, if you want to call it that; growing up in a culture where you’re assaulted by images of violence.” It’s incendiary stuff, steeped in the literary nihilism of Ellis, Bolaño, Ballard, and, of course, Houellebecq, subject of Rob’s essay for gorse.
