Paris 2015: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux #2: Alfred Jarry

The unnamed grave of Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) is fittingly bizarre. Jarry had a huge influence on a large number of people and literary or artistic movements, such as those involved in the Theatre of the Absurd, surrealism, dada, and Oulipo (particularly with his 'Pataphysics). In short, he was far before his time, and as such he had the power to shock, as in his very strange and most famous work – the play Ubu Roi (1896) – in which the first word is the euphemistic 'Merdre' (for 'Merde'), which is so conveniently translatable into English as 'Shirt' (for 'Shit'). Jarry is also well known for his bicycle, his revolver, drinking absinthe to excess, and for his last wish on his deathbed at the age of thirty-four: a toothpick.

Henri and Gérard Baüer: Cimetière de Charonne #2

Henri Baüer (1851–1915) was a writer, critic and journalist and the son of Alexandre Dumas fils. He was a communard officer who took part in the semaine sanglant at the end of May 1871 and as a result was exiled to New Caledonia for seven years.

 

On his return to Paris he wrote for the conservative Écho de Paris, becoming an influential drama critic. He strongly supported the naturalist theatre, was a Dreyfusard, and was the only critic to support Alfred Jarry in the Ubu Roi scandal. He left l'Écho de Paris in 1898.

Gérard Bauer (1888–1967) was Henri's son and Dumas fils's grandson. He too worked for l'Écho de Paris (for a much longer period than his father), and published five volumes of chronicles, a novel and a short comedy.

Kenneth Goldsmith in The Believer, October 2011

I'm a little late getting round to this article, but I think it's something I should make a note of as it's so challenging to our conception of literature. As indeed it's meant to be. The full title of the article in The Believer, including the subtitles, is 'Kenneth Goldsmith (Poet): What Happens when Sense is not Foregrounded as Being of Primary Importance: Some Books Better Thought about than Read: Finnegans Wake[,] The Making of Americans[,] The works of Kenneth Goldsmith'. Dave Mandl writes an introduction about Goldsmith, and then has an email interview with him.

Goldsmith has written books such as Soliloquy, which contains every word he spoke in a week; The Weather, which is a transcript of a radio station's weather reports over a whole year; and Day, which is the text of an issue of The New York Times retyped. You get the idea.

And that's what this is all about: ideas. Goldsmith calls himself a 'conceptual writer', and says he has a 'thinkership' rather than a readership: his books are evidently more or less unreadable, so their value is as thinking tools, or what Goldsmith calls ''pataphysical reference books', an expression that made me immediately think of Alfred Jarry and Oulipo, so I was hardly surprised to find Goldsmith enthusing over Michel Houellebecq enthusing over Georges Perec and Jorge Luis Borges, or to learn that he has established an educational resource called UbuWeb.

Goldsmith also works at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches 'poetic practice and the art of plagiarism'.

And the interview is here.