But the panel “- Speak Easy – An Evening of Poetry and Performance” is still on with Michael Cirelli and Rouda on :
7:00 – 8:30 pm @ Culver City City Hall, 9770 Culver blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

            Laure Murat was born and educated in France, where she received her doctorate degree in History. She came to the United States in 2006, and started teaching in the department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, where she received tenure in 2009. Murat currently teaches 19^th and 20^th century French literature and a course on the cultural history of Paris at the university.

Laure Murat has published a number of books and essays, for which she has received a number of different awards, among which are the prestigious prix Goncourt of biography for her book La Maison du Docteur Blanche (The Clinic of Doctor Blanche), and the prix Femina de l’Essai for L’Homme Qui Se Prenait Pour Napoléon (The Man Who Mistook Himself for Napoleon). She was also recently awarded the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship grant, which she is planning to use to spend a year in Europe conducting research for a new book. The book, which is tentatively titled “ Women as Symptoms, or Madness at Work,” will explore “ how madness and creativity together are at work inside a family with a member who is succumbing to mental illness”. She will be examining cases such as James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, and Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle, among many others.

When asked about the differences between French literary thought and American thought Laure Murat points to an interesting issue. She explains that French theory was very strong in the 60’s and 70’s, and it was at that time that it had a huge influence on the United States. For example, Foucault’s history of sexuality gave way to queer studies and gay/lesbian studies in the United States, and the United States created queer theory for instance, however, while there was an influence of French literary thought on the United States, there was no return of these thoughts and theories from America to France. While many theories and ideas came to the United States from France, not many of these ideas went back to France once they had evolved. According to Murat, there is in a way a sort of impoverishment or weakness in France in this sense, it is a sort of lack of intellectual energy, not among the French intellectuals but in the French university. These theories were transported to America and evolved but never really returned to France. An example of this trend can be Modern Art, which was very strong at the beginning of the 20^th century in France, and especially in Paris, however it then went to New York, and the United States used it as a tool and elaborated on it and made it what it is today;  and while it is very strong in New York at the moment, it is not as strong in France anymore.  Laure will be expanding on this issue at Vis a Vis during a panel discussion featuring Sylvère Lotringer, and Noura Wedell, where they will be discussing “French theory in America and French theory in France: The Semiotext(e) experience”.

Here is a presentation of “The Man Who Mistook Himself for Napoleon. For A Political History of Madness.” (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

            “Ambitious monomania”, “césarite”, “revolutionnary neuroses”, “morbus democraticus” (the malady of democracy): from 1789 to 1871, French physicians have coined many “diseases” related to political convictions. How can one read today this epistemological construction? Is French history legible through registers of lunatic asylums and how? How can primary sources inform us about the discourse of madness in relation to the political? Based on unpublished archives and materials of the nineteenth century, The Man Who Mistook Himself for Napoleon explores the relationship between ideology and pathology, attempting to understand how political events such as revolutions and advent of new systems of government affect mental health and/or can be represented as delirious in the French psychiatric and literary discourse. Rather than denouncing wrongful confinements, this study aims to analyze what is at stake in the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry and political theory.

Sylvère Lotringer is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS) and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University. As a literary critic and cultural theorist, he was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States through his contribution to Semiotext(e),and the Foreign Agents book series.

Born in Paris in 1938, Sylvere Lotringer was a “hidden child” during the German occupation of France. In 1949, his family moved to in Israel, but they returned to Paris the year after. He belonged to a left-wing Zionist movement until 1956. In 1958, Sylvère Lotringer entered the Sorbonne and created a literary magazine called L’Etrave. During France’s colonial war in Algeria, he led the mobilizations against it. The following years, he taught in Scotland, in Iowa and in Erzurum, Turkey and Sydney, Australia. In 1965, Sylvère Lotringer attended the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, VIe section (Sociology) in Paris and defended his doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf, supervised by Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann, in 1967. He returned to the United States in 1969, teaching first at Swarthmore College and then joining the French and Comparative Literature Faculty at Columbia University in 1972. He is currently based in New York and Baja, California.

Lotringer’s interests range from philosophy, literature and art to architecture, anthropology, semiotics, avant-garde movements, structuralism and post-structuralism. Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne and received his doctorate from the École Pratique des Hautes Études VIe section in Paris in 1967 before moving to New York in the early 1970s. Sylvère Lontriger has published many books throughout his career, among which are Pure War (1983), Crepuscular Dawn (2002), and the Accident of Art (2005), which he co-wrote with Paul Virilio. He has also co-written Forget Foucault (1986), Oublier Artaud (2005), and The Conspiracy of Art with Jean Baudrillard. Sylvère Lotringer has also written extensively on Georges Bataille, Simone Weil, L. F. Céline, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme, and is the author of Antonin Artaud (1990), French Theory in America (2001), Hatred of Capitalism (2002), David Wojnarowicz (2006), and Overexposed (2007). Silvère Lotringer frequently lectures on art and has published catalogue essays for the MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Musee du Jeu de Paume, Modern Kunst and has edited numerous magazines and books such as Philosopher-Artist (1986), Foreign Agent: Kunst in den Zeiten der Theorie (1991), and Nancy Spero (1995).

Confronted with a different leftist intellectual scene in the United States, dominated by the post-Frankfurt School Marxism, Sylvère Lotringer decided to disturb its order by introducing more fluid ideas of power and desire as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. As a strategy to position himself outside of academia while still being part of it, Sylvère Lotringer founded a journal with a group of Columbia students entitled Semiotext(e). The idea behind its first issues was to discuss the epistemology of semiotics through the practice of ‘materialist’ semiotics. Feeling limited by its linguistic model, Sylvère Lotringer turned to visual arts and the examination of non-verbal signs. In 1975, as part of the journal’s provocative activities, they organized a ‘Shizo-Culture’ conference on ‘Madness and Prisons’ at Columbia University. For the first time, major American artists like John Cage and William Burroughs had an opportunity to meet French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Lyotard. More than two thousands people attended the event, an event that also helped Sylvère Lotringer redefine the concept of Semiotext(e). Subsequent issues were made as collages of images and texts instead of the standard scholarly format. Drawing on the experience of the first event, Sylvère Lotringer organized ‘The Nova Convention’ in 1978, a three-day event as homage to William Burroughs,featuring performances by Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and Timothy Leary. Nevertheless, in 1985 Sylvère Lotringer ceased publication of the journal, after noticing the shift in the cultural life of New York that changed the collectivist spirit of the ’70s into a more individualist character. Instead, he started an influential new book series entitled Foreign Agents, responsible for introducing, among others, the work of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio across the Atlantic.

One of Sylvère Lotringer’s permanent interests is in the alternative social movements that challenge current power relations. Calling himself a ‘foreign agent provocateur’ in the US, he traveled to Italy in 1979 to document the post-Marxist Autonomia movement, later published as Italy: Autonomia – Post-Political Politics (1980). In the ’90s, he invited a former Black Panther, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, to collaborate on the publication of an anthology of writings entitled Still Black, Still Strong. In the last several years Sylvère Lotringer commissioned works by Paolo Virno, Franco Piperno, Christian Marazzi and Antonio Negri as his returning interest in Italian political theory.

Read an interview of Sylvere Lotringer in Frieze magazine.

Noura Wedell has organized a number of conferences and colloquiums, notably a symposium on the expanded field of writing in the works of Robert Morris, the collected papers of which are currently in press. Her research centers around experimental and conceptual writings, theory, the relation between text and image, and the intermingling of politics with aesthetics. She belongs to the editorial committee of French Experimental Writing Magazine Nioques, and is both an editor and translator for Semiotext(e).

Read an excerpt from Odd directions :
« Ligne D, Lyon, vers le Nord
Fille, visage vers le sud, parle. Les animaux n’arrêtent pas d’enlever leurs chapeaux. C’est la première fois que ça arrive, elle a déjà fait l’expérience trois fois. Elle pense que c’est parce qu’ils ne changent pas la litière pendant la semaine de l’expérience. Les animaux dorment sur la tête. Ça doit s’infecter, ils sont stressés, et puisque ça gratte, ils enlèvent leurs chapeaux. Elle doit leur mettre de la crème sur la tête et ne peut pas nettoyer les cages puisque ça perturberait les données. »
“North on D train. Lyon.
Girl facing south speaking. The animals keep taking their hats off. It’s the first time it’s happening, she has already done the experiment three times. She thinks it’s because they don’t change the litter for a week during the trial period. The animals sleep on their heads. They probably get infected, stressed, and it scratches so they get rid of their hats. She has to put cream on their heads and she can’t change the litter for fear
of messing with the data.”

Listen to Noura Wedell talking about poetry (in French) – 0:27 min

“More Nirvana than Mao” is a phrase Aurélien Masson likes to use to describe himself. After joining the prestigious Gallimard Editions as a “Grand lector”, he became the head of “SN”, the Série Noire, one of the oldest institutions inside Gallimard. Masson may be the youngest director NS has ever known, but he knows his crime fiction. His dynamic nature and his good eye were crucial in bringing forth the rebirth  of French hardboiled fiction, as illustrated by Antoine Chainas and DOA, and many others featured in the collective short fiction book Paris Noir. This is what he had to say about it in the introduction :

“ENTER THE DREAM”

 Good to finally hear from you but don’t forget to send me an introduction.

This e-mail from Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple has been blinking on my computer screen for the last two days. But when I chose to work in book publishing, it was precisely to avoid having to write anything; I want to stay in the background, the way a bass player stands in the dark and smiles as he watches the guitarist launch into a wild solo.

I kept going around and around without a clue, like a mouse on its wheel, until I finally decided to visit Mom, the old guy who sells used books in my neighborhood. If Paris is still and always will be a “noir:” city, it’s in part because of Momo and his toiling colleagues, the dozens of small, independent bookstore owners who sell old pulp fiction from the ‘50’s through the ‘70’s. Amateurs meet every weekend and swap their own finds for new treasures. Momo’s the one who trained me as a kid by handing me Goodis, Thompson, Chandler. So you can just see him going soft all over at the idea of the Série Noire making it to the American scene. We. The French, are good at importing things… but exporting is another story.

We’re having a smoke outside the well-lit café, Momo and me. It’s been eight months now that smokers walk around the sidewalks in circles like penitents. My first time in New York, I got a kick out of watching the ballet of smoked-out people moving in and out of bars. Never in France, I said to myself. But we French end up doing everything exactly as the Americans do, a few years later at best. So the time is right to include Paris in the Akashic Books Noir Series. Momo thinks, and rightly so, that I’m short of brilliant ideas, so there he goes drawing a historical picture of Paris, the city of crime. He tells me about working classes, exceptionally dangerous, who peopled the belly of Paris in the nineteenth century, until the bourgeoisie kicked them out with big avenues and urban renewal under the reign of the late, unlamented Baron Haussmann.

Two beers later, Mom is on the Butte Montmartre with the gangsters of the ‘30’s and ‘50’s, the early days of junk deals, streetwise Parisian kids, and loud, foul-mouthed prostitutes whose slang could frighten even the bigwigs. The problem with Momo is that he loves beer and the more he’s in love, the less clear his ideas are. He’s now on to the filmmaker Melville, the actor Alain Delon (he’s one of our specialties like un-pasteurized Camembert), and sepia photographs.

But all of a sudden it dawns on me that practically nothing of this improvised lecture has registered, and I get all tense. No wonder you learn things in classrooms, not sitting on hard stools in cafés where the atmosphere is too bright (as in the famous “Atmosphère, atmosphère, est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère, moi?” – Arletty’s indignant response to Louis Jouvet in the film Hôtel du Nord).

Back in front of my insomniac computer, this is what I tell myself: The key thing to say is that Paris is a city that lives, and thus dies, every day. No point hiding behind history or war memories. What is a threat to Paris, to its noir dimension even, is potential “museumification”, the possibility of the city turning into a big theme park. In Paris, after all, everything is still there. All you have to do is look around with eyes wide open. In the shadows of his big car, the chauffeur in Marc Villard’s story dreams about saving the love of his life, a prostitute stranded on the asphalt like a bird caught in an oil spill. Further up north, around the train station, Jérôme Leroy follows in the footsteps of a guy on the run with the feds at his heels, and the men in black aren’t simply gents of the FBI. Concurrently, Salim Bachi lets us examine two young men of Arab descent who have a hard time fitting into a closed society; unfortunately, whether in Paris, New York, or Karachi, it’s hard to resist the temptation of violence, always present, insidious, and sneaky.

And what about the Chinese guy, delightfully depicted by Chantal Pelletier? He thought he’d have a taste of the famous French cuisine… until he realizes that the choice dish will be himself.

Far from cliché postcard photos, we witness the revenge of the waiters along with Jean-Bernard Pouy: They go to a lot of trouble to locate an unknown jogger who has mysteriously stopped taking his daily run through the Place des Vosges and disappeared.

Everything takes place in cafés, not just Momo’s beer-soaked history lessons. That’s where the doomed lovers in this volume meet to secretly celebrate Christmas. Didier Daeninckx’s reporter, an expert in tracking rumors on the Internet, was also seen for the last time in a café, before getting stabbed to death on rue des Degrés. But who knows, maybe those weren’t actually rumors after all. And speaking of rumors, don’t tell DOA that the violence of Russians is only a rumor. Let him tell you about his previous girlfriend, a Russian model who loved diamonds too much to go unnoticed. Behind the fake jewelry and the glamour, the fashion world hides serious predators. Ask Layla, Dominique Mainard’s heroine in “La Vie en Rose”, if she really see life in rosy tints. To her, life is nothing like a reality TV show; the budding young singer who dreamed of having top billing will end up very low on this earth. No Grammy for the young dreamer, only a body bag. Under its polished stones, Paris remains the place of daily tragedy; under the Parisian pavement, there’s the Peloponnese. Like that son of Laurent Martin’s coming back home after a long exile to find that you can’t escape from your ghosts or from the love you have lost.

Beyond the lights, beyond the cafés and bars, Paris is sometimes like a grave. It’s a city you run away from, or at least dream of running from. But on every street corner, the past jumps at your throat like a grimacing hyena. Patrick Pécherot will take you for a walk into the heart of the 17^th arrondissement; in fact, the Gestapo were based in that area in the early ‘40’s. Some would give all the money in the world to have a dead memory, but when your mind starts playing tricks on you, life quickly turns in a nightmare. On into madness…

Watch Hervé Prudon walk around the 14^th arrondissement; if you ask him for directions, don’t talk to him in English: You’ll run the risk of having him answer, “No Comprendo The Stranger.” My advice to you is to follow him without a word; take side streets, stroll with him along rue de la Santé, where you’ll find a jail, a psychiatric hospital, and Samuel Beckett’s last place of residence. Discover his magical Paris which exists only inside his head.

You don’t inhabit your city, you dream it. All I can do now is invite you to enter the dream.

Aurérlien Masson
Paris, France
August 2008

Listen to Aurélien Masson talking about Noir fiction (in french) : Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Listen to Percival Everett reading from his book “Not Sidney Poitier“.

“I managed to register for all my classes, just as the other freshmen so managed, and I assumed without much less surprise than I. It was a complicated matter that might or might not have had a computer involved. My classes were what one could expect, predictable survey courses, composition, rudimentary introduction to calculus, I decided to get into an upper division English course titled « the Philosophy of nonsense » taught by some guy named Percival Everett. I needed his signature to get the course so I went to his office. I found his door open. Before I tapped on the jam to announce myself, I saw that the room was lousy. There was sports equipment, basketballs, inflated and not, tennis and squash rackets, a hockey stick, a baseball bat, a baseball glove on the desk, and a pair of boxing gloves hanging on the wall between portrait drawings of James Joyce and Terry Mcmillan. There was a photograph of another man high on the wall above the others. I knocked.
“Come in and sit down.” Everett said, continuing to read sporting news. “What do you need ?”.
“Your signature.” I told him, “I want to take your nonsense course.”
“What year are you in?”
Still he didn’t quite look at me.
“I’m a freshman.”
“Anybody ever tell you you look like Harry Belafonte?”
“Never.”
“I’m not surprised. Where is your card?”
I pushed my blue card toward him and he looked at me, as if for the first time.
“Like Belafonte.” He said. “Not Sidney?”
“That really is my name.” I said.
“Or else it wouldn’t be on the card.” He said. “I like it. Do you play golf? And I don’t mean miniature golf.”
“I never have.”
“Good. It’s a stupid game. A damn waste of water keeping all that lawn alive and green. How about lunch, do you eat lunch?”
“Occasionally.”
“Me too.”
“Come on and I’ll buy you what passes for lunch on this campus. What do people call you?”
“They seldom call me and when they do, they call me Not Sidney.”
He looked at me.
“That’s too bad.”
Then he studied his desktop.
“Tell me, do you see my glasses?”
“They’re on your head.” I pointed.
He nodded.
“Well, that’s a good place for them. I think I’ll leave them there. Come along, Mr. Poitier.”

Listen to James Ellroy reading an excerpt from his last book: “The Hilliker Curse“

“I pointed at Rita Hayworth’s name on the screen. My mother glared at it. My dad went back to the ’30s with La Roja Rita. It pre-dated his circa ’40 hookup with Jean. Rita was half Anglo, half Mex aristocrat. My dad was working as a croupier in TJ. Rita’s father hired him to watch-dog Rita and deter mashers. My dad told me he poured Rita the pork on several notable occasions. I cannot verify this assertion. My dad did enjoy a long run as Rita’s chief stooge. Rita sacked his lazy ass, circa 1950. My parents defied easy classification. Jean Hilliker hit late ’38 L.A. She won a beauty contest, tanked a screen test and returned to Chicago. She lived in a big pad with four other nurses. A beefy bull dyke ruled the roost. Jean got pregnant, and hemorrhaged. A doctor chum undid the damage. She had an affair with him, dumped him and married a rich stiff. Marriage #1 fizzled pronto. Jean remember how good L.A looked and caught a bus. A friend knew a ginch named Jean Feese. Jean F. was married to a hunky drifter named Ellroy. They met, they sizzled, they shacked. My dad dumped Jean #1. Jean #2 got pregnant in 1947. They got married in August. A troubled pregnancy foretold my rapturously troubled and memoir mapped life.”

James Ellroy gave an exclusive interview which is both in French and English and can be watched here : Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

But as much as he enjoys writing for the movies, Allison says it was always a second choice. His first love is writing fiction. After ten years of success in Hollywood, Allison decided to go back to his roots in fiction. His first published work, “Christopher : a tale of seduction” was a finalist in the Pen USA center fiction contest in 2004.

His last novel, “Death by Sunshine” came out in 2012.
Listen to an excerpt, read by Allison himself.

“My first encounter with an effigy of Jayne Mansfield dates back to the spring of 1977. She had been dead for ten years almost to date. Editor Regine Desforges had just made a facsimile of Kenneth Anger’s book “Hollywood Babylone” which came out in 1959 in Jean-Jacques Pauvert editions. I immediately knew that this character with a plunging neckline, her eyes pierced by night and her shiny teeth, framed by two columns of sex-shop pink letters would play an important role in my adult life. I was 17, I had just read the Satiricon, the chestnut trees of Paris were blooming, I was at this time of youth where tastes form. I already loved blood, wigs, and bleached blondes. I was less precise and more of a fetishist than I am today.

When I discovered several years later, in Italy, the first photos of the accident where Jayne Mansfield had been a casualty on June 19th 1967, my heart literally leaped with joy. Since the age of four, I have been fascinated by car crashes. I don’t know why God made me so, and God knows that car crashes were beautiful in the 60′s. The news of her decapitation overwhelmed me to the point that I could no longer walk around, trying to contain this state of intoxication that was taking over me. I had cherished the mutilation of queen Marie-Antoinette of France whose image I would kiss in an old history textbook when I was a boy. It all fit together. Almost too well, up to the actress’s chihuahua dead on the ground, in the dust next to a ripped lock of blond hair. Il cane di Jayne Mansfield morto the caption of the photograph said. I loved this image, and its caption in Italian was so morbid chic.

Years passed. The airhead from 1100 Sunset Boulevard never really left me. I wrote her poems in Latin, I collected everything I could find about her. I ended up thinking that Jayne Mansfield would be one of those extras that give depths to backgrounds. A talisman.
Finally, thirty years later, thanks to another encounter, I understood that Jayne was going to take the part of myself that belonged to her. Every day since, I spent with her the moments we had promised each other in the June of 1977. A novel of joyfulness and death. Forgetting the most auspicious years, I focused on the date of the crash : 1967. By mentioning her last living moments, I managed, or so I hope, to give her back the crown that the impact with the truck had knocked away on a Lousiana road, a morning of June, in the earliest hours of the morning”

Simon Liberati

Jayne Mansfield died in a car accident on June 29th 1967, on route 90 between Beloxi and New Orleans. After the collision, one of her blond wigs was found on a tree branch, hence the legend according to which she had been decapitated. Far from a star biography, Simon Liberati starts his story with a clinical description of the accident. Only after forty pages will the reader finally learn the identity of the passenger whose skull was fractured when her head hit the windshield. As the reader follows him into the story, the star of “The Girl Can’t Help It”, who dreamed she was Marilyn Monroe’s rival, comes back to life.

Jayne Mansfield claimed an IQ of 163 , spoke five languages and was a trained classical pianist and violinist, but the public only knew her as a busty blonde from the 1960’s. After several bad movies and failed marriages, as a result of  which she had five children from three different fathers, Mansfield sunk into alcohol, LSD and nevrosis. By 1966, her downfall had started. Forgotten by the studios, balding, she was reduced to undressing herself in squalid hovels. “Deposed of her movie star status, she had become the greatest freak show, in the way of Lola Montès” Simon Liberati writes in this novel about the dusk of a blonde bombshell, who became a pioneer of kitsch.

Read and excerpt from “Jayne Mansfield” by Simon Liberati (in french)
Watch Simon Liberati in the famous french talk show “Tout le monde en parle” (in french)

Aside from being an awarded essayist, and winner of the Prix Médicis in 1995, for “La tentation de l’innocence” (The Temptation of Innocence), and the Prix Montaigne for “La tyrannie de la penitence” (The Tyranny of Penitence), Pascal Bruckner is also an accomplished writer.
His novel “Lunes de Fiel” (Moons of Venom), was adapted into a film in 1992 by Roman Polanski and he also received the Prix Renaudot , for his book “Les voleurs de beauté” (The Thieves of Beauty) in 1997.

Read Condemned to Joy by Pascal Bruckner