Word: lautreamont
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There was also Surrealism, which for many Catholic kids with artistic ambitions was the door out of orthodoxy. Kelley's work is larded with references to early eccentrics from the Surrealist pantheon, like the suicidal dandy Jacques Vache and the writers Raymond Roussel and the Comte de Lautreamont. On the other hand, his drawing is almost entirely derived from comic strips. Both confessional and obscure (why else would the museum have served up no fewer than 17 catalog essays to explicate it?), his work can nevertheless pack a flailing, provincial-surreal wallop -- now and then...
...Hotel Lautreamont...
This path--from overcrowdedness to retreat, through loneliness, the fear of endings, and the search for childhood--is only one of many a reader could take through Hotel Lautreamont; in this dense book of 82 poems, there is a sort of conversation among the various kinds of quatrains--between those with refrains and those without, for example; there is a debate among several poems as to their speaker's putative uniqueness, and whether other people might notice it; there are love poems, and poems "about" architecture, and parodies of newspapers, fashion pages, idle chatter and funeral orations...
Ashbery loves contingency; for him, the lyric moment is the moment before our minds are made up for a particular action or a particular way of seeing. It is not the instant of choice, but the instant before, in which these poems take place. If that denies Hotel Lautreamont the chance to affirm any one view of life or mind, it is, surely, a small price to pay for lines, views, forms, surprises, ideas and indeed whole poems so various, comic, sad, elegant and moving as the many in Ashbery's new book...
...erotic paradise without guilt." Freud and Havelock Ellis ("the supreme triumph of human idealism") are cited. Fair enough from these specialists, but Lely insists that one letter can be compared only to "the music of Mozart." In other places, Shakespeare and Aristophanes are somehow invoked. The correspondence foreshadows De Lautreamont, Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred...
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