If you are interested in an avi file of this film, please email me, soon … before “les graines disparaissent”

your blog is a rare pleasure!

—mahendra singh

I still haven’t read the Roussel book. It might lose something in translation.

“Roussel’s most famous works are Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, both written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns. Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: “I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two found sentences, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus.” For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table? must somehow reach the phrase, ?les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard/letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer.”

but I have read that he slowly commited suicide by taking small amounts of posion knowing just when it would be fatal enough to finally kill him

“Perhaps not surprisingly, Roussel was unpopular during his lifetime and critical reception of his works was almost unanimously negative”

Still he did manage to make it into The A-Z of Great Writers by Tom Payne which is where I found out about him.

“He made his system known posthumously, sending the manuscript of How I wrote Some of My Books to be published after his death – which he timed by increasing his dosages of barbituates until they killed him. Even his end was part of a plan whose author never seemed eager tto let it be understood”