WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
i remember the tricolore textbooks. for some reason the phrase <<son et lumiere>> with quotes like i've written them sticks in my head from them. there was always something about going to watch a sound and light show as an evening activity. and i always wondered what the hell they meant.

“Avez vous de la confiture?”

- “non je ne suis pas la chatte britannique”
 

sus

Well-known member
I watched Paris Texas the Wim Wenders film last night and there was some interesting shithole in Texas named Paris, haw haw vibes.
 

version

Well-known member
"Then there are the damn French, and you're so unsure of them you don't know where to put them on the scale. Beckett is perhaps the worst of the French, because he was Irish. He didn't have to be French at all."
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I was just thinking about Napoleon and it made me think, maybe we pay too much attention to our national differences here, us Anglos, and not enough to our shared cultural strengths and values, like how we are two of the three (Germany?) countries in the world to see through France's cultural pretensions

the French are honest though. Honest racists, honest sophisticates, honest sweet talkers. Anglos are not. Everything you have is inferior German. Even their sausages taste better than your abomination.
 

catalog

Well-known member
hang about I thought the whole point about england was that it was french as well as anglo saxon??

all the names for meat - pork is derived from porc and all that. then we've retained the german for the cheaper / unrefined things? something like that.

i suppose you could say that america got all the people who were most disenfranchised in england, so the worst of the worst, but you could also say best of the best in a way. like australia as well.
 

catalog

Well-known member
The majority of migration from Europe to the US was German
I like to think of the M62 as a river. The source is Hull in the east and the mouth is Liverpool in the west. It was a channel for East-West migration. And there's even "Little Germany" in Bradford where German Jewish textile workers set up large Mills.
 

version

Well-known member
Pete Doherty moved to France and turned into Balzac.

301q9cwjzfl71.jpg
 

catalog

Well-known member
“Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's intervention was a good thing for France.”

“Why not?”

“I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by the very people they came to protect.

The Hundred Years' War, in effect, was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition.

Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end.

The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know.

Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracingembracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, and customs were alike.

On the other hand, the coronation of a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France, separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying us – inseparably, alas! – with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at all, but Spaniards and Italians.

In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic, perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race – Devil take it!”

Durtal raised his eyebrows.

From Huysmans, La Bas (Down there)
 

catalog

Well-known member
im about 130 pages in now and it's slowed down a bit with the intro of the love interest and the very detailed bit about incubi and succubi, but it's still good.

something about those opening chapters though, the sheer momentum of them all - 2 blokes in a room getting drunk talking about what's wrong with art and literature.

the 3 page description of that grunewald painting.

all the chat with the bell ringer and wife with the meticulous descriptions of the dinner.

really very impressive book.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It's funny, I don't remember that book at all, could barely describe what it was about to someone if asked, yet, as you mention those passages, each one comes floating back to me out of the ether. I wonder if the whole book is secretly buried in my subconscious like that, or if it's just those three passages you described, which is possible if they are your favs I guess.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
im about 130 pages in now and it's slowed down a bit with the intro of the love interest and the very detailed bit about incubi and succubi, but it's still good.

something about those opening chapters though, the sheer momentum of them all - 2 blokes in a room getting drunk talking about what's wrong with art and literature.

the 3 page description of that grunewald painting.

all the chat with the bell ringer and wife with the meticulous descriptions of the dinner.

really very impressive book.

You need to immediately follow this up by reading En Route, The Cathedral and The Oblate of St Benedict without stopping and in that order.
 

catalog

Well-known member
It's funny, I don't remember that book at all, could barely describe what it was about to someone if asked, yet, as you mention those passages, each one comes floating back to me out of the ether. I wonder if the whole book is secretly buried in my subconscious like that, or if it's just those three passages you described, which is possible if they are your favs I guess.
There was a weird sync cos I was discussing conceptronica with thirdform and then thought I would read 10 pages before bed and it was literally all the same stuff we had been saying. You could quote from it and just swap a few terms around.

So an experience similar to Ulysses for those first 80 pages, where its describing the world I'm in.

It just happens with books sometimes, you pick em up and it's like they're the world in front of you.
 

catalog

Well-known member
You need to immediately follow this up by reading En Route, The Cathedral and The Oblate of St Benedict without stopping and in that order.
Not sure I'll manage that cos I just ordered about 10 other books but we'll see
 
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