The New Litter, Glossop, Derbyshire

There's nothing new about litter itself, and there's a whole history of different kinds of it throughout the centuries. More recently, bottles were thrown over bridges in rivers and streams, such as the Codd's bottles and gin bottles that have been reclaimed by modern amateur archaeologists. And later came the plastics, the condoms, the apparently worthless exhibits of human waste. Now comes a bang up-to-date item: the mask, a result of the COVID-19 virus, but the individual who dropped it here had the fear of the virus to use it, but not the intelligence or condideration to consider that it might cause harm to other people, and so spreading it. We live in a weird world in which our neighbours count for nothing: a world of self.

Claude Tillier: Mon oncle Benjamin (1843)

Claude Tillier's Mon oncle Benjamin is perhaps better known as a film: Édouard Molinaro's Mon oncle Benjamin (1969) starring Jacques Brel followed René Leprince's silent film of the same name in 1924. Georges Brassens proclaimed that anyone who didn't like the book was no friend of his. Yet Claude Tillier (1801-44) remains a figure little known in the history of French literature.

Mon oncle Benjamin is an anarchic, episodic novel set in the mid-nineteenth century and narrated by the unnamed great-nephew of Benjamin Rathery. Benjamin is a very talented doctor practising in Clamecy, a lover of women, but above all a huge fan of good wine (indeed alcohol in general, almost to the point of alcoholism) and good food, although he cares nothing for money and has accumulated huge debts to various tradesmen. Benjamin is twenty-eight at the time the forty-year-old narrator tells the story, and the uncle lives with his sister and her husband Machecourt. Benjamin's sister in particular thinks her brother should be married, and what better match than to Arabelle Minxit, the daughter of the rich doctor M. Minxit, who loves Benjamin as though he were his son? Well, because Arabelle loves the villainous M. de Pont-Cassé, that's why. And Benjamin appropriately behaves very coldly towards her.

Anarchic? Yes, Benjamin shows no respect for anyone in authority. When the Marquis de Cambyse is offended that Benjamin doesn't greet him with great respect, Benjamin tells the marquis that he has spent years earning his title, whereas the marquis has spent none for his. Time for a fight.

And fighting is what Benjamin does well, but without blood being spilled. I particularly like the moment when the good doctor wants to have the part of his cheek, which the marquis has been forced to kiss, removed after his death and moved to the Panthéon, to which he adds, when it's been built. It's at moments like that that Mon oncle Benjamin reads much later than a mid-nineteenth-century novel. A classic.

Éric Chevillard: Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur (2003)

Éric Chevillard's Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur is of particular note in Chevillard's work because it's a homage to his Minuit publisher Jérôme Lindon (1925-2001), who had once suggested that he write a story that everyone already knows. Chevillard understood by this that Lindon would have appreciated a more visible narrative thread in his works, although Chevillard didn't immediately know what to do with this advice.

And then the idea of the tale 'The Valiant [or Brave] Little Tailor' by the Brothers Grimm came to him, a story he appreciated, and of which the 'authors never pretended to be authors': this is after all a tale which has been handed down orally over the centuries. And needless to say, Chevillard will introduce numerous digressions in the novel, almost (but not quite) making the story unrecognisable.

There is a Préambule (or Foreword) in which the digression already plays fully into hands of the fans of digression: a précis of Hans Christian Andersen's folk story of 'Hans-My-Hedgehog',  which of course recalls Chevillard's previous novel Du hérisson (On the Hedgehog) (2002), and Chevillard's central interest in survival of all forms, in protection.

To recall, 'The Valiant Little Tailor' is a very brief tale of an unnamed tailor annoyed by flies around his marmalade sandwich. In a stroke he kills the seven flies around it, and permanently leaves his accommodation with a banner around him saying he's killed seven at a stroke. People (unaware of what the number refers to) are in awe, and then he meets a giant who is eager to display his talents, but the tailor defeats him through a mixture of intelligence and deception. Soon the king learns of the tailor's feats and invites him to deal with two giants in the forest wreaking havoc. The valiant little tailor sees them sleeping under a tree, climbs up it, throws stones at the giants, thus provoking them to argue, fight and kill each other, and so he wins the hand of the king's daughter and half of his kingdom.

Of course, Chevillard re-visits this story, re-re-visits it, re-re-re-visits and so on. If the story were originally a straight-line narrative, it is now full of digressions –such as a tale of modern-day sexual aggression on the métro, or a re-write of the traditional story of Tom Thumb.

Chevillard's books are resolutely, furiously, not just novels, they are a number of stories at the same time as they are a collection of anti-stories, or maybe anti-linear stories: they lead the reader into cul-de-sacs, spread false trails, meander.

Chevillard twists things, represents the novel as palimpsest, with the hero as the writer rather than the subject, but self-denigrates, creates amusing situations out of the frivolous, but also the serious, the vitally serious. Éric Chevillard is a writer for this century, and mercifully he isn't going away.

My Éric Chevillard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Éric Chevillard: Oreille rouge | Red Ear (2005)
Éric Chevillard: L'Explosion de la tortue (2019)
Éric Chevillard: La Nébuleuse du crabe | The Crab Nebula (1993)
Éric Chevillard – Au plafond | On the Ceiling
Éric Chevillard: Le Désordre azerty
Éric Chevillard: Dino Egger
Éric Chevillard: Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur
Éric Chevillard: Le Caoutchouc décidément
Éric Chevillard: Palafox
Éric Chevillard: Un fantôme
Éric Chevillard: Du hérisson | Of the Hedgehog
Éric Chevillard: Démolir Nisard | Demolishing Nisard

What restaurant shutdown? I keep my distance! Glossop, Derbyshire

The whole world's a restaurant to wildlife, as this little creature shows. And most wild animals keep a very safe distance: this shot is a little blurred because it was taken from a hell of a distance away. I'm sure that this squirrel will keep his distance from Charlie Windsor, who wants to cull all of his like.

Art brut (Outsider Art and associated): latest update

Art brut (Outsider Art) and associated:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Rémy Callot, Carvin (Nord)
Carine Fol (ed.): L'Art brut en question | Outsider Art in Question
Kevin Duffy, Ashton-in-Makerfield
The Art Brut of Léopold Truc, Cabrières d'Avignon (34)
Le Musée Extraordinaire de Georges Mazoyer, Ansouis (34)
Le Facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal, Hauterives (26)
The Little Chapel, Guernsey
Museum of Appalachia, Norris, Clinton, Tennessee
Ed Leedskalnin in Homestead, Florida
La Fabuloserie, Dicy, Yonne (89)
Street Art City, Lurcy-Lévis, Allier (03)
The Outsider Art of Jean Linard, Neuvy-deux-Clochers (18)
Jean Bertholle, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Jean-Pierre Schetz, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Jules Damloup, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Camille Vidal, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Pascal Verbena, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
The Art of Theodore Major
Edward Gorey's Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod, MA
Marcel Vinsard in Pontcharra, Isère (38)
Vincent Capt: Écrivainer : La langue morcelée de Samuel Daiber
The Amazing World of Danielle Jacqui, Roquevaire (13)
Alphonse Gurlie, Maisonneuve (07)
Univers du poète ferrailleur, Lizio, Morbihan
Les Rochers sculptés de L'Abbé Fouré, Rothéneuf, Saint-Malo
Robert Tatin in Cossé-le-Vivien, Mayenne
René Raoul's Jardin de pierre in Pléhédel, Côtes d'Armor
La Demeure du Chaos, Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône (69)
Emmanuel Arredondo in Varennes Vauzelles, Nièvre (58)
Musée de la Luna Rossa (revisited), Caen, Calvados (14)
La Fontaine de Château-Chinon, Nièvre (58)

Éric Chevillard: Oreille rouge (2005)

Éric Chevillard's Oreille rouge is certainly a satire on the autobiographical travel book, but also on the mindlessness of tourism itself, the people who collect tourist tat and tick off the places they've visited. But more than that, it's an investigation into the psychology of tourists. Reality is filtered through self-consciousness: life is not so much lived as seen to be lived, the imperative being to expose yourself to be viewed as a kind of model. Inevitably, I'm reminded of the millions of selfies posted on social networks, the endless shots of people posing on the Great Wall of China, by the Statue of Liberty, Ayers Rock: 'Look at me, I've got a bit of money, aren't I wonderful?' Frankly, no, you're anything but.

Oreille rouge is named after his stay in Mali, where he to a certain extent got suntanned (well, his ears did) and where he has, as a writer, been invited to spend some time and write about his experiences. The novel is in three parts: the invitation and his reaction; the stay; and the effect after the return.

The first part is Oreille rouge's reactions and involve his refusal concerning the absurd invitation to go to Mali, and he invents endless excuses not to go there. It is of course largely a question of fear of the unknown, of not surviving in a strange country or continent, but Oreille rouge comes to see the necessity and finally can't refuse. There are many absurdities here, but then with Chevillard that is only to be expected.

So Oreille rouge arrives in Mali, is welcomed by a family, and his guide Toka is to lead him to the hippopotamuses he longs to see – well, hippos are an essential part of Africa, aren't they? So Toka teaches him all about them, their activities and when not to look for them (the dangerous mating season). Oreille rouge learns a great deal about hippos and other animals, is mad keen on writing the poem of Africa in his (probably fake) moleskin notebook. Mauvaise foi (in the Sartrean sense of self-deception) rules. Then Oreille rouge learns by accident that his guide Toka (like, say – Oreille rouge suggests – Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo or Julein Sorel) has been lying to him, spinning him yarns about the existence of hippos, which Toka has probably never seen.

Finally Oreille rouge returns to France full of stories about the wonderful Mali, unable to prevent himself from adding numerous comments whenever Mali is mentioned, unable to mention Mali whenever it's not mentioned. He's an expert on, er, uncharted territory, and hates it when liars talk about their experiences of Africa, especially Mali. Oreille rouge is no tourist but a seasoned traveller, bringing back such items as a model elephant from Bamaka market: no tourist he!

My Éric Chevillard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Éric Chevillard: Oreille rouge | Red Ear (2005)
Éric Chevillard: L'Explosion de la tortue (2019)
Éric Chevillard: La Nébuleuse du crabe | The Crab Nebula (1993)
Éric Chevillard – Au plafond | On the Ceiling
Éric Chevillard: Le Désordre azerty
Éric Chevillard: Dino Egger
Éric Chevillard: Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur
Éric Chevillard: Le Caoutchouc décidément
Éric Chevillard: Palafox
Éric Chevillard: Un fantôme
Éric Chevillard: Du hérisson | Of the Hedgehog
Éric Chevillard: Démolir Nisard | Demolishing Nisard

Éric Chevillard: L'Explosion de la tortue (2019)

Éric Chevillard is hardly a new name to me, although in the past I've merely regarded him as an interesting experimental novelist. I'm not too sure what persuaded me to look deeper into his work to discover that he is a major writer tout court, and not just a major French novelist, but I've been reading and re-reading L'Explosion de la tortue and can only marvel at its brilliance. Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa's paper 'La tortue et l'orang-outan : une fable écologique d'Éric Chevillard' is a fascinating criticism of the book, which he divides into seven parts. I'll follow his path but with my own ideas.

First, there's the story of the Floridian pet baby turtle Phoebe left in the bathroom of the narrator's flat in Paris while he went on summer holiday with his live-in girlfriend Aloïse, with (as he thought) enough bath water to survive (and survival is a key theme throughout Chevillard's work). But the water ran out – a fault of the plug, the turtle's lack of survival instincts?, etc. Anyway, the narrator finds the turtle almost dead, which he finalises by accidentally pressing on the decalcified shell too hard with his thumb and breaking it. He agonises and agonises, full of what Sartre would have called mauvaise foi (or self-deception).

Second, we move to a different tale in which the unfortunate Bab (short for babouin or baboon) is hung from the fourth floor of the narrator's school when he was young, and Bab nearly dies because of his loose (Chelsea-kind) of boots. Bab is a souffre-douleur (a punch bag or scapegoat), and Le Souffre-douleur is a short story in (the fictional) Louis-Constantin Novat's five-story collection Pagure, the name of which relates to crabs of the hermit variety, but I'll leave that there as it might lead to confusion. The narrator continues the talk of torment though and he and two of his schoolmates manage to extract a false confession from Bab that he had sex with his mother, as it seems to be normal because the three bullies appear to have done so, or had it done to themselves, by their mothers.

Third, there's a very short section twenty years later in which the narrator meets Anton, the guy who sold him Phoebe. Anton talks about an improbable trans-Atlantic journey of a hippopotamus (recalling the much sought-after hippos in Chevillard's Oreille rouge), which is evidently an allusion to Novat's 'Le Voyage de ''hippopotame', again a short story from Pagure.

Fourth, the works of Louis-Constantin Novat (circa 1839-92), which the narrator has discovered in the possession of Novat's (now late) great-great-great-great-niece. This is a (fictional) writer whose complete works the narrator has intended to (re-)write (much of the book is about re-writing) and publish, although the publisher has gone behind the narrator's back, so to speak, and chosen the academic Malatesta, who gives the narrator a headache. A number of Novat's works are précised here.

Fifth, a résumé of more of Novat's works are mentioned and/or summarised.

Sixth, there has been an underlying story of the young missing girl Lise, and all along it's been evident to the reader that she's been kidnapped by the concierge. The police raid, in which a battering ram is taken to the concierge's flat, clinches it, although with a weird turnaround (which of course (?)) is the narrator's joke, isn't it? Apparently this has resemblances to Novat's only play La Portière et le saute-ruisseau.

Seventh is what Afeissa calls the strangest, and with some reason. Novat's works are taken up again, first Novat's unknown poems to Euphémie Flers, a young girl he unsuccessfully tried to woo. The narrator re-writes these seventy-seven poems in modern French to win over his girlfriend. No, that's not strange at all. But what is numbingly weird is that the narrator – annoyed with Novat's novel Queue coupée, in which Novat agonises and agonises over cutting a lizard's tail off as a young kid – decides to rewrite the novel as L'Explosion de la tortue: in other words, on an analogy with Chevillard's L'Œuvre complète de Thomas Pilaster – the title of this book should really be L'Œuvre complète de Louis-Constantin Novat.

And that's not even talking about the ecological message in the book, the turtle seen as metonymic of the destruction of the planet, or even the irony, the comedic and absurd elements that many readers love about Chevillard. This work is not a story, nor even the number of stories that it contains, but a kind of contemplation on the nature of the writing, the re-writing (and therefore the reality) of literature, and reality itself. Without hyperbole, one of the most annoying, irritating, confusing, profound and brilliant books I've ever read.

My Éric Chevillard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Éric Chevillard: Oreille rouge | Red Ear (2005)
Éric Chevillard: L'Explosion de la tortue (2019)
Éric Chevillard: La Nébuleuse du crabe | The Crab Nebula (1993)
Éric Chevillard – Au plafond | On the Ceiling
Éric Chevillard: Le Désordre azerty
Éric Chevillard: Dino Egger
Éric Chevillard: Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur
Éric Chevillard: Le Caoutchouc décidément
Éric Chevillard: Palafox
Éric Chevillard: Un fantôme
Éric Chevillard: Du hérisson | Of the Hedgehog
Éric Chevillard: Démolir Nisard | Demolishing Nisard

Nouba Hilselberger, Le Havre, Seine-Maritime (76)

The self-taught Nouba Hilselberger sculpted this model of a musician with musical instrument, which is at the résidence Atahualpa, rue Salvador Allende, Le Havre. Unfortunately we didn't at the time know of Hilselberger's other sculpture, a tribute to Stendhal in rue Stendhal, Dollemard, Le Havre. Stendhal stayed at L'Hôtel de l'Amirauté in Dollemard in 1837 in a fine room on the second floor with a view of the port,  but hated the foreign tourists staying at the hotel. The huge chimney in his room had a cast iron plaque of the three Fates, which is now on the wall in the Archives Municipales in Le Havre in Fort de Tourneville, next to the Cimetière Sainte Marie.

Glossop, Derbyshire, 1 April 2020

High Street West, Glossop, Derbyshire, 1 April 2020. A small, normally bustling town of some tourist interest. Now, the streets are almost deserted, Manor Park virtually free from cars and children, more pigeons, moorhens, jackdaws and ducks in the town than people. I've never been in a war zone, but this must be something like it. Horrifying.