PARIS – Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities

 

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Edited by Andrew Hodgson – 2019
With work by Craig Dworkin, Lauren Elkin, Gaia Di Lorenzo, Olivier Salon, Chris Clarke, Yelena Moskovich, Camille Bloomfield, Stewart Home, Amalie Brandt, Ian Monk, Andrew Gallix, Eric Giraudet De Boudemange, Andrew Hodgson, Philipp Timischi.
When I read this book in due course, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My concurrent review of ‘We’ll Never Have Paris’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/)

14 thoughts on “PARIS – Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities”

  1. CRAIG DWORKIN
    From DEF
    It seems appropriate that just now while starting by chance a different book’s simultaneous Gestalt real-time review I wrote this:
    “Poetic meditation on why this is written in prose — and not in poetry as a form — is not it at all, so why did I write it just now even while I am writing the same sentence that contains the wrong description of what I am reading? Tattoos, skinheads, inner demons, the act of hearing waves outside while being in the London of the small hours, then watching the car windscreen wet up on the way to the seaside within the same sentence of mine that describes him still being in London, still in bed.”
    Where sentences change their mind mid-sentence especially when they endure Proustianly forever! Perhaps just change the London above to Paris? Both defined as city, though, so no real change there in definitional literature. Hyperlinks, such as the one above, though, can change definitions of books if not in or about books?
    Reply
  2. LAUREN ELKIN
    I am a French Novelist
    A wonderfully amusing description of being a woman in a short skirt at a signing for one’s first book, the characters and events involved, the irony of the above subtitle. L’art pour l’art. No didacticism at all. Or none I detected. Only her ass grabbed…
    “…stravaigin, Gaelic for purposeful walk without a goal,…”
    Reply
  3. GAIA DI LORENZO
    For me Gaia is the new Gestalt. Here a quilt of quotes and references ranging from Derrida to Harry Potter, now, in my hands, become a lump of clay plumped on the spinning wheel, allowing language to mould one’s self, as well as vice versa. A filter working both ways. Beyond the Mumble Door. Or strengthened by the Ohm Resistor of literature.
    Reply
  4. OLIVIER SALON & CHRIS CLARKE
    “Can a text be aware of its own translation?”
    In itself, a scintillant experiment in translation between French and English in interface with the audience intended. Seems to evoke a number of the thoughts in my mind that have already skirted upon my reviewing processes, including Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy. And a text, even when frozen on printed paper, changing between one’s first reading of it and the next. Is a hyperlink a sort of translation?
    The avant garde and me when I briefly thought about it in 2013.
    Reply
  5. YELENA MOSKOVICH
    I know you know
    A wonderfully unforgettable (I think) story of the narrator’s meeting an old woman friend outside of FB Messenger, a woman who tells her a new story about herself as a child when she… well, men have lead in their pencils, so what do girls have to do? Actually, the reason for her actions as a child is beautiful and unmistakeably unforgettable! And so is the Russian woman unforgettable who approaches them with a google map. The smell of warm cabbage, notwithstanding.
    “Also, in case it adds up, I don’t know why she picked a café neither in her neighbourhood nor mine, but rather smack dab in front of the Notre Dame cathedral,…”
    My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/#comment-16011
    Reply
  10. ANDREW GALLIX
    Macron Death Party
    I think this is the finest example in this book of the two way filter with We’ll Never Have Paris (see link above), whether in-tended or not. Please see the in-references in this work of authors’ names with whom I am becoming acquainted by dint of both books. The sexual undercurrents. And overcurrents! The New Wave cinema as if I have put streaming such references on You Tube. And more. This Gallix work itself, as well as the two books in optimal gestalt, and indeed possibly my own process of reviewing any book: “that straddled the porous border between criticism and autofiction.”
    My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/#comment-16325
    Reply
  12. ANDREW HODGSON
    Tuileries
    “, where they lived in that granny flat that, rented directly off the cat who called it home and had outlasted said granny,…”
    This book is either the granny flat to the larger Paris book I am concurrently reviewing or its Duchamp pissoir outlet drain-valve or its direct two-way filter of mutual conduit or it is a completely discrete éclat (but hardly discreet.) It is admirably all these things at once, I claim, as this work’s love rhombus of two men and two women stands at two sides of a train platform or the Seine. Both conduits themselves. A Joycean word-frustratus with word clusters as, arguably, the ends or beginnings of some of the otherwise unfinished sentences in the other bigger book.
    All tailed off with a filmic photograph of a woman in a baby-harness by PHILIPP TIMISCHL. And this also has the book’s final sentence with its last word on things, videlicet ‘expensive’ as in to expend (disburse, drain, express) the runny substances running between us.
    end
    Reply