Something interesting to read later in spring...

Parisian Sketches
Author: J. K. Huysmans
Translator: Brendan King
Cover illustration: David Bird


'Parisian Sketches is a clear prelude to Against Nature. The model is Baudelaire transforming the sordid landscape of the modern city with fleeting glimpses of perverse beauty. Grotesque details plucked out from the whole, intensified to dreamlike proportions, turn ugliness into a source of pleasure.'
Jennifer Birkett

First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show of brasserie paintings at La Vie Moderne gallery, J.-K. Huysmans' Parisian Sketches shares with these vibrant Impressionist works a fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, an exuberant Paris in the era of the Opéra Garnier and the Folies-Bergères. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, whom Huysmans championed when it was unfashionable to do so, Parisian Sketches is an all-out assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed impressions - of café concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of run-down slums and forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny 'City of Light'-Parisian Sketches recreates the Paris of the bal masqué and the cancan, the brasseries à femme and the buveurs d'absinthe, all captured with an intimacy and an immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.

First new English translation for over 40 years.
With contemporary illustrations by Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli.
Includes introduction, bibliography and notes.

Bucky?

DG

Where is Bucky?

I think we lost him to the Great Porn Harvest of 04.

DG

He fired the 1,000 monkeys and sold
999 of the typewriters.

...at least he stopped using white-out on the computer screen.

DG

he's busy publishing the cliffs notes version of his grocery list.

Maybe he fell off his soapbox.