Tony Duvert: from 'Adécédaire Malveillant'

2007-06-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

translated by Electric Newspaper Boy

ANTIPREFACE

No, the aphorism is not an irreproachable literary genre. Its trim phrases always have something fat about them, and they share the lot of fat girls, or of boys with nothing but a fat cock: one gives in to them privately but does not acknowledge them publicly.

*
A collection of small opinions, remarks, ideas -- a catalogue of abusive
generalizations.

Of course, everything that can be said in terms of generalizations is
false: but it's also exciting, like a scandal. An act of revenge.

Capricious, slanderous, and spiteful: this is what you are. And you love
it.

*
Thought in the form of "collected thoughts" has something beastly about it.

-------------------------------

A

ABJECT

Many are the trials which reveal the abjectness of the magistrates
more than the faults of the accused.

*
I resign myself to the observation that the men I judge "abject"
resemble me entirely.

ADOPTION

It is as easy to beget as it is hard to adopt. Candidate parents for
adoption are chosen more carefully than future spouses, who will
nonetheless hold over their progeny the right to cruelty, violence, and
death.

The majority of the young left to their natural parents are forever
_lost_ children.

AIMER (to love)

You want to be loved "for yourself?" Then love a dying rich man.

*
The longest-lasting joy of love is that it comes to an end.

*
_He loves me_ means, in plain language, he accepts that I may capture
him, tame him, and violate him, and kill him, and bury him.

*
Every day people see somebody to love: but one must be loved in return,
and one judges one's self unworthy. Hence the rage for having children:
they're obliged to submit to you, without talking back, without
recourse. The law is against them; the law is for you.

*
For several years, they lived their lives together. Especially him.

*
Certain women indecently construct for themselves a virtue out of loving
(a _cordon bleu_ told me: "I dine with my heart, myself."). The word
"love" slurs through their lips like a case of menorrhagia.

Still, loving is as simple as hating: having ears and ears is enough.
Men, beasts -- they do it in silence.

No doubt these women must endlessly reassert that they love because they are incapable of doing so. They are centripetal.

*
The one story of love that touches me takes places between a lame duck
and a three-pawed dog, both barefoot tramps, frightful looking, filthy,
inseparable.

This couple is far, far removed from Tristan and Isolde -- more
evocative of Bouvard and Pécouchet.

The dog and the duck renounce the idea of playing their romance straight (after one absurd attempt).

*
In love, to say "yes" to someone is to offer him certain of the self's delicacies that one cannot one's self enjoy, but find good for him. He's then rather like an absurd antiques dealer who flushes upon witnessing a coveted or attic or cave:

-- I can take everything?
-- Yes, yes. Everything. You'll be relieving me of the burden.

Incredulous, he helps himself, and imagines stealing off with you, too.

*
Let the idiots go empty-handed.

We are inculcated with the false idea that mutual love is exceptional,
almost impossible. This lie discourages initiative, even though the
majority of attempts succeed. The adolescent dies of thirst in front of
a lake of potable water and, come of age, attaches himself to the worst
liaison without daring to seek out something better -- astonished that
any imitiation, filthy as it is, of such inaccessible happiness should
have dropped out of the sky at all.

*
The less you see yourself, the more you love yourself. If you've never
known yourself at all, you'll love yourself your whole life. That's what
I'd call success.

*
I sustain an incurable desire for certain beings who I didn't know how to approach or win over at the time, or who disappeared before I'd found enough joy in them. In revenge, those who did satisfy my hunger -- their equals, nevertheless -- I hardly think about at all. I've stashed their memory neatly away along with the junk and memorabilia I attach to them, perhaps for my old age, should it be surrounded by the untouchable.

*
To love someone: devouring his life with my eyes brings me consolation
over my own life. But to observe myself disgusts me: to contemplate it
is nothing but painful and scours me out of myself.

*
If we only ever loved with clarity, every man would be born, live, and
die alone.

AMBITION

To imitate nothing but the inimitable.

ANIMAL

The idealist delegates his animality to the men he debases. He eats beasts killed by brutes. He relegates to prostitutes the vices his morality and his wife condemn. He leaves his vanquished, his children, to the various functionaries of punishment. He throws out his refuse for those of humbler means to collect it again. He entrusts his dirty laundry, his tacky hair, his black fingernails, his fetid skin, his rotten teeth, his decaying organs, his impotent glands, his dead muscles, to a hundred slavish dirt-removers, drainers, doctors. It is others who pay him and cook for him whatever might appease his hunger and drunkenliness.

Relieved of the toils of the flesh, our humanist seeks angels and
masses, spiritual perfumes, medals, crosses, celestial arts. He wrinkles
his nose in disgust if he hears a crude word, if science attacks him, if
he reads any sort of realism. Toward such materialism he is indignant:
he's got a soul, he does.

*
The enormous number of pets that the French keep: one must give a eulogy for our good hearts.

What shit. The French keep dogs because they really don't like dogs.

ARGENT

I have a terrible tendency to ask for money from whoever says good
things about me.

*
Various apologists of old have demonstrated that in unhappiness --
sickness, marriage, but most of all poverty -- our friends abandon us.
(These authors, it appears, knew how to choose their relationships.)

But who am I to forget in times of prosperity? What hand held out to me will suddenly strike me as greedy? Money reveals who we were before we came to posses it: that's why one is wrong to condemn the wicked hearts of the rich. I myself do not have the means to cherish my vices; those made rich have the means of inflicting their own on me.

ARISTOCRAT

The silly bearing, narrow vulgarity, and grimacing platitudes of our
aristocrats, as pretty as herons crossed with sows. The newspaper in
their talons is written for withdrawn little prudes and the piss ladies
of the church -- O prince, behold your people!

ART

Art shapes the eye and the ear with which we perceive this supposed
reality from which we nonetheless say art is detached. A man without a
visual culture sees nothing.

ASSOUVIR (to appease)

It is not true that we struggle against the savageness of man when, in the manner of priests and police, we appease our own savageness in that struggle -- which always has cruelty as its means, and people as its victims.

AU DELA (the beyond)

The paradise of Christians would be hell for me. If their insupportable
god exists, he will thus condemn me to sit beside him

AUTEURS (authors)

To read but rarely my colleagues' books -- a butcher doesn't subsist on
sausage meat.

AUTORITÉ

Parental authority is the absolutism of physical force and of money. The
young don't like to admit it: parents keep nothing but affection and
obligation on their mouths, and -- without a single allusion to their
portfolios -- in their fists.

AVANCE (ahead, being ahead)

If you're ahead of your time, then tomorrow the imbeciles will adore you
at last.

AVOIR (to have)

Acquisition excites me like rape. Possession unsettles me; all is heavy.
The goods that stick with me are worthy of a magpie's nest: a bed,
meaningless scraps -- photos, writings, the sounds of voices.

AVORTEMENT (abortion)

Priests do not beget children: they order you to beget them for them.
Thus the pill and legal abortion have emptied the seminaries.

In other times, in every large family there was always one weakling, cripple, or cretin; the priests took them in, and the Church prospered. Nowadays, the people don't have enough children to throw any of them to the crows, and the Church dies.
----

2007-06-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

----
'B'

BABY BOOM

Born in 1945, I somehow cultivated the strange conviction of belonging to the first civilized generation of men on earth: finished were war, religion, censure, violence, tyranny, injustice, racism, misery and hunger. I've looked for where, or by whom, I was inculcated by this atrocious illusion. But I haven't found any serious possibilities other than The Mickey Mouse Journal.

BASIS OF THE BASSET HOUND

This dog would rather play with shoes than with hats. He doesn't put back up what has fallen to the ground; he makes it his companion. He appreciates millipedes, golf tees, balls that lost their bounce, croquet hoops; he barks at slugs who climb *up* stalks.

*
A mannered aunt, with a deep, creamy voice and crud-collecting moustache, reads feminine romances in the evenings to her dachshund. The poor beast has become incontinent from it all, eyes empty, nipples inflamed, chops pendulous; you'd have to cover it up.

BEATEN

If I had been *properly* beaten, today I'd be Leslie Johnjohn, winner of the Women Readers' Prize for my romance-romance, "Maria Marriage" (a sagaga), and I'd have chateau. But I've spoiled my life's work, madame.

BEAUF [a shortened form of "beau-frčre," a perjorative word for a middlebrow/lower-class Frenchman]

From the mother to daughter: the gorilla gets humiliated, straightened out with slaps, sold for weddings. Every big cunt is the product of such shabby, dragonesque matriarchy. No father would commit such things.

It is true that fathers are still to be born -- but from whom?

BEAUTY

"Beauty is a silent lie," wrote Theophrastos twenty-four centuries ago. No doubt he was thinking about the ephebes of Athens.

If he were to skim Parisian cafés one night for those sweet guttersnipes throttling pinball machines and waiting for pederasts, a philosopher from the Sorbonne would understand once more this complaint from Lesbos.

They are beautiful to the point of pain, these young boys, as taught and smooth as their cocks; booze-faced children, criminal silhouettes, pearly flashes of teeth, of hair, their quacks of contempt, their groins blonde and nervous with torrential sperm. All this throws mature, ugly, potbellied, hairy, famous men into religious emotion.

Alas, these adolescents scatter their beauty throughout town without putting anything underneath it. They've got nothing but a flea in their skulls, they don't admire your spirit, they don't even know the name of the greenish boor that adorns their favorite banknote. The cruelty of desire that youth inspires... I curse you, deceitful charms!

Philosopher, you're cheating. It's not beauty that lies; it's you who lie for its own purposes, and this lie is your hell.

The boy is living proof that beauty does not signify. Beauty is neither he nor anyone else; it has no content, no end. It is possibly the only tangible form of the Present, the absolute void. It leads nowhere and tells you about nothing other than you yourself.

No one has ever truly enjoyed human beauty, neither he who sees it or he who displays it. The beauty you capture will leave you as hungry as the beauty that escapes you.

As far as the beauty of a work of art goes -- yes, this also may be mere illusion, but... whatever. You know one thing about it at least: you've often created beauty on the page.

BABIES

The brains of the young look for their bodies with despair. Just open up their diapers, impregnated with excrement; a portable prison within which they are taught in the compliant and puritan Nordic fashion.

Same for the adult, in his permanent butt bath, a padding which would ban looking and touching front and back, would make you a fool and an idiot. But isn't this what you wish your children were? Like you, fools for enjoying punishing them -- and idiots for enjoying their resembling you.

BČGUES (stutterers)

One million seven hundred thousand stutterers in France -- this country where one speaks so little.

They have a spokesman stutterer, who I heard on the radio. His complaining went badly. Too bad they'll remain in the minority.

BEST-SELLER

If a dog craps on the right side of a good sidewalk, a thousand soles a day will publicize his turd. The dream of all authors.

-- Have you read X's best-seller?
-- No, but I've had to walk in it.

BEAST

Good books are for times of good health. Sick or unhappy, I read nothing. Or worse.

*
Very small children have a predilection for very big animals: whales, elephants, giraffes, that gentle doggie called the lion -- such are their first little friends. This sometimes occasions deadly incidents at the zoo.

As he grows, the little man loses his taste for dwelling among the big beasts: he begins to cherish the mediocre ones, and more profoundly. Even a little red herring will enchant him, and he'll cry when it dies.

Readers of novels follow this pattern. Cultivated readers favor personalities without quality, lives nearly devoid of a story; they see themselves perched on Beckett's shoulders. Meanwhile, readers less well instructed seek out heroes who are grand like mountains: billionaires, champions, demons, divas, masters of the world. It is the collective shell of millions of such individual krill that amasses in the baleen of the giants of the sea.

*
My brain is less animal in nature than I am, and my daily affairs often inconvenience it. To these affairs it says things:

-- Go for a walk. Learn your grimaces. Take a leak on some passers-by. Gnaw on your toes. Sleep for fifteen hours. Get wasted for the next week and a half. Line yourself up a beardless lad. Paint polka dots on your ass. But please don't write anything more: you're driving me crazy! Let me think; you're good for nothing! -- he repeats in his muffled voice.

-- Well then what are we supposed to live on? And who exactly is making these demands? An *organ!?*

BIPED

To remain without ideas on a thousand subjects, rather than accepting those that have currency: prejudices, communal places, convictions, final proclamations...

This is a harmful choice: it blesses a tyranny of the brain, which prefers to think the false rather than leave a void. Chickens know everything.
----

2007-06-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

----
'C'

CALUMNY

Calumny always wins: it is piquant word that flatters our malevolence. Even if denying it will always be a tangled-up, confused, laborious affair that bores us senseless with charmless truths -- innocence is displeasing.

CATHARSIS

There is catharsis in literature when the hard reality the writer portrays is transfigured by its successful expression. Virus weakened equals vaccine. Formal beauty seizes and uproots the very cause of the suffering that the work's theme revives.

But beauty appears solely as the outcome of a personal education, and the effect of catharsis is not noticeable except to those who have learned to _read_. An infinite task.

Others harbor their own microbes, and content themselves with the bandage on their abscesses, with the poultice of cat litter that they call a good book.

CECITE (blindness)

"That man went blind: we don't see him anymore."

For _blind_ also means _invisible._ Blindness hurls you into certain underground worlds where no one will follow you.

CENTRISM

What's between the left ass cheek and the right one? The ass crack, straight and narrow. And what does it do? It grimaces from one side to the other, it loses its balls, or gets things shoved in. Thus, a centrist.

CHARLATANS

There are rainmakers because it rains.

CHASSE-CROISE (dances in which partners are switched off)

There are only aggressors and victims, and, as in children's games, we trade off with the roles. No one complains unless it's always the same players who get beaten: Hey, loser! It's *my* turn to be loser!

CHIFFRES (rags)

According to the polls, though our compatriots don't make love very often, they do enjoy televised eroticism instead. According to their tastes, sex is a little bit like soccer: they love the match, but don't want to knock any balls.

CHRISTIANITY

-- How am I supposed to believe in that great god with a white beard if I don't like whiskers?

-- Well, what about little Jesus?

-- They didn't crucify him as a child. That spoils everything for me.

* The Christian god is a usurer. He only grants you life to take interest on it (requiring dedicating a cult to him), to recover the principle, and to punish you if the Last Judgment doesn't work out for his profit. To write: _Capitalism and Theocracy,_ 10 vols. (very expensive).

CLOWNS

Speak, cry, and goof around like 30-month-old children. But amongst themselves they slap each other around; that's not as bad; just like any mother on the prowl.

COEUR (heart)

Sick sac of flab digesting beneath the sagging breasts of badly washed shrews.

COMEDY

Comedy of working professionals: no time to meet with you -- too many meetings. No time for conversation -- too many middle-men. No time for working -- too much work. No time for being here -- I've got to be everywhere.

COMMISSIONS

A _committee of experts_ is a gathering of barbarians dressed up to hide the State's latest violation of some liberty.

COMMUNISM

The less the USSR frightens us, the more communism effaces itself from the field of French politics. A paradoxical thing: for it would finally have to seduce us all of a sudden with a humanist, egalitarian civilized image -- bourgeoisified, almost reconciled with the worst of the lower right, the Christian right.

But no: the better one breaths in the east, the more our poujado marxists shrivel up in their dated rags, false collars, squirrel
slippers, hemstitched undershorts, braided caps, ribbons, buttonhole stitches, and laces; they more they suffocate to induce pity, their own red, wooden language forced back into their beaks.

Every new gulag isolates them a little more. Has the electoral viability of the French Communist Party lay in repose upon the distant menace that it denies and of which it was one the avant-garde promissory? These poor devils have no more hell to sell: and they will waste away caught up till the end in their old memories -- just as our executioner, sent into retreat, continues, I suppose, to look after the guillotine, just in case -- and the steel blades are rustproof. The "dictatorship of the
proletariat" no more: trying to rub out its stains of rust and blood, let us hope, will be of little use.

CONFORMISM

A man becomes a conformist to conceal that fact that he is not even a man.

CONNAISSANCE (knowing someone or something; acquaintanceship)

_Know yourself:_ whence the success of such a menacing idea?

It's that in reality it promises a delight: to become superior to others.

To know one's self just well enough to read others, neutralize them, maybe subjugate them. To suppress therewith any compulsion they might have for having more to know about me.

_Know yourself_ means only: inflict upon yourself a suffering which, tomorrow, will abolish all you pain. Your eternal, despicable slackness comes at the price of one hour of honesty towards yourself.

CONSEIL (council, advice)

Every giver of advice is saying to you, in the spirit of wanting the best for you:

Be like me; that would please me.

COPIES

<<>> -- Guillaume Salicetti. _Traité de chirurgie,_ 1275 A.D.

The lower politicians express themselves by copying the argumentation, the argot, the diction, the mimicries, the tics, the vocal timbre, the habitual humor of their leaders. You can identify their party before they make a sound. Mitterandists, Rocardians, Communists, Giscardians, Chiraquians or fascists each howl, garble, rant, blow up, chatter, stammer, hoot, blab, murmur, hum and haw and drone like their big uncle.

Such mimicry proves the superiority of the human nervous system (for no beasts would imitate our political leaders so well) as well as the non-existence of souls in the valets.

COQUETTES

Certain women love the company of effeminates because with them they forget what shames them in the face of the male: a patent homeliness, a patchwork anatomy, a misshapen vulva, a pin head. They bathe in the futilities that the villanous coquettes of both sexes parcel out: hair, rags, gossip, novels, perfumes, jewelry.

CROWNS

On the occasion of someone's success it is proper to send a wreath of condolence: his success tells me the story, long and lugubrious, of all the dead ends that forced him there.

COURT

Nothing circulates faster than a short slogan. Parrots speak briefly.

CRIME

How must we kill human beings in order to live? You're not called a murderer unless an identifiable corpse can be attributed to you. But you are innocent if you distribute your violence over a sufficient number of victims. You can cut off two hundred hands, two hundred legs, rip apart the sex and bodies of fifty more -- without a single death, or so judged. The perfect crime exists: it is your life.

CRUELTY

We don't call something cruelty unless we are the victims. What we inflict we christen "necessity," "love," or "right."

CULTURE

To read the way books are praised it would seem that a novel has to make you "dream" or make you laugh. All else is damned.

A strange pharmacy. Novelist, you put out sleeping pills, and the plume of your pen does nothing but tickle people under the arms. When will we have novels specially formulated against hemorrhoids, tooth decay, revolving strikes, or the unpleasant intimacy of girls, those savage noodles who haunt our kitchens?

Coddling slackness, licking up to the soft -- this is what we can expect henceforth from written culture -- which had once been the meeting of two free men. No: you may enter here, Sir, only if you know how to put me to sleep. Anyway, I don't read anywhere but in bed: since the age of eight, the joy of reading has replaced that of sucking my thumb.
----

2007-06-14T09:35:00.001-07:00

----
'D'

DANGER

How dangerous the feeble are in their frightening passion for aligning themselves behind imbeciles!

DEMAIN (tomorrow)

There's not much to what we call "progress:" beneath this shimmering flag we find little more than the repair of yesterday's errors and blind preparation for tomorrow's.

DEVENIR (to become)

The mediocre is unable to overcome any given defect except by adopting a worse defect: the ignorant becomes a pedant, the timid acts peremptorally, the skeptic becomes a bigot, the prude exhibits himself, the constipated craps, the celibate finds a spouse.

DICTIONARY

"The Smaller Illustrated Larouche:" the dictionator that's afraid of us -- the one where no typical high school student will find a single dirty word he knows. So he writes graffiti in it that needs no orthography. How wicked.

DIES IRAE

The ancient Greeks mislead man, that innocent who is indebted to them for his vices and crimes. The tenderness of this mythology!

The Christian god -- he, apart from the fact that he condemns twenty acts that wouldn't bother anyone, has created men whom he has abandoned to the evil he punishes and shall punish again. The "Good" passes for the general punishment of humanity and the rage of its god; we are presented with this horrible legend as a consolation, a revelation and an ideal toward which we are supposed to convert the entire planet.

DIRE (to say)

Why would one oppose fiction and non-fiction stories? Writing them requires the art of lying on the one hand and of veracity on the other.

For if the novel is nourished only on people's memories, the non-fiction story is nothing without the imagination which must invent, word after word, a way to tell it. If you have nothing but an original story, vocabulary, grammar, and integrity, your memoirs will be flat, your essays will bore us, your truths will remain within the ink, mute and weak for ever. Such trifles are unattractive unless well-styled -- adroitly made up, dressed in their naivité to stir our rumps. The reader is a necrophile who desires the illusion of life.

DOCTORS

This popular old author, who prides himself on being at one moment a "good old community boy" -- he flatters himself the next moment, as if it were somehow universally dishonorable to have pursued studies and to write books, that "one" has bestowed him with "these" doctoral efforts.

We need to know, pépé: good or not, all this studying?

In fact, if you've pushed passed that piece of paper, well, those grad students -- you know what shams they are and you'd piss on those puck-heads. They bluff you like you were a virgin, old man; don't you know how to get it up once in a while?

DOS (back)

In the Middle Ages and until the fifteenth century, sodomy was called the "délit de l'épine" (offense of the spine or backbone). The sex and age of that backside mattered little: the Church wanted nothing out of it but the buttocks, those devils. The sacrilege was in making love to the inverse side of the body.

The Abrahamic religions are the only religions in the world that persecute both of masculine rings: prepuce, anus. These savages believe they thereby de-feminize the male body.

In renouncing circumcision, Christianity may appear less barbarous, but it is worse than Judaism and Islam, for it extends its persecution to sexuality in its entirety. The eunuch is the Christian ideal. Saint Paul had already abandoned cutting the foreskin; he exacted more: the cock and the ears.

I've seen voluptuous young Italian boys masturbate within the foreskin, without ever exercising its retraction, so it adheres to the glans; almost resembling phimosis. In reality, it's like a secret vagina, always available at the whim of the egoist member for its caresses.

DOULEUR (pain, suffering, sorrow)

Cruel reality, revolution, earthquake, famine, execution, torture, assassination, butchery of children, spectacular accidents, hideous deformation, senility, sickness, unemployment, vermin, entombment. What pleasure we take in the sight of each other's suffering! It confers upon us the easy lightness of birds. Their desperation consoles us, their drama appeases us, their decrepitude rejuvenates us, their ugliness dignifies our muzzles, their crippled gait makes us dance,, their misery makes the sun shine from our behinds. In the despair of man I enjoy a vitalizing intoxication that I do not acknowledge to myself.

Such enjoyment is so necessary, so universal -- every culture has practiced it, certainly -- it _pacifies_ those who take pleasure in it to such an extent that only an inept moralism would deprive youth, children, the "weak" of it, on t.v. or elsewhere. _They_ need it more than anyone else. To see the real violence of the world renders us milder and more peaceful than submitting to the violence of censorship.

DRESSAGE (training, discipline)

Mother and father unwittingly criticize their children for the very defects, vices, and habits that their children acquired from them involuntarily, whether by heredity or by example. But how sweet it is to keep your likenesses from becoming better than you!

*

In conversation with me, the boy who had a severe, violent father (a neuropath, I think) further multiplies his father's twists, his apologies; he makes objections, inserts parentheticals, overwhelms you with his contemptuousness insistence that *that* word, *that* idea, is too... too... no, that doesn't make sense; didn't mean to insinuate anything, of course... He guards his left, he guards his right, rear, front, and insides; he guards against alarmed looks, blurred words, nervous gestures, and the incessant attacks in which his own discourse bristles up of its own accord.

Yes, it's with his father that he is speaking, with his father that he's fighting. He ignores me; he sees a pair of britches and immediately suffers and is afraid. You'd take him for a lab rat, set up in a Skinner box designed to create a maniac. Set the poor animal free on a bare table, and he only imagines himself again imprisoned in the labyrinth, and, in terror of electric shock, he follows his typical contorted course, his somersaults, his backtracking, his anxious explorations of impasses, corridors, and dangers which no longer exist.
----

2007-06-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

'D'

DANGER

How dangerous the feeble are in their frightening passion for aligning themselves behind imbeciles!

DEMAIN (tomorrow)

There's not much to what we call "progress:" beneath this shimmering flag we find little more than the repair of yesterday's errors and blind preparation for tomorrow's.

DEVENIR (to become)

The mediocre is unable to overcome any given defect except by adopting a worse defect: the ignorant becomes a pedant, the timid acts peremptorally, the skeptic becomes a bigot, the prude exhibits himself, the constipated craps, the celibate finds a spouse.

DICTIONARY

"The Smaller Illustrated Larouche:" the dictionator that's afraid of us -- the one where no typical high school student will find a single dirty word he knows. So he writes graffiti in it that needs no orthography. How wicked.

DIES IRAE

The ancient Greeks mislead man, that innocent who is indebted to them for his vices and crimes. The tenderness of this mythology!

The Christian god -- he, apart from the fact that he condemns twenty acts that wouldn't bother anyone, has created men whom he has abandoned to the evil he punishes and shall punish again. The "Good" passes for the general punishment of humanity and the rage of its god; we are presented with this horrible legend as a consolation, a revelation and an ideal toward which we are supposed to convert the entire planet.

DIRE (to say)

Why would one oppose fiction and non-fiction stories? Writing them requires the art of lying on the one hand and of veracity on the other.

For if the novel is nourished only on people's memories, the non-fiction story is nothing without the imagination which must invent, word after word, a way to tell it. If you have nothing but an original story, vocabulary, grammar, and integrity, your memoirs will be flat, your essays will bore us, your truths will remain within the ink, mute and weak for ever. Such trifles are unattractive unless well-styled -- adroitly made up, dressed in their naivité to stir our rumps. The reader is a necrophile who desires the illusion of life.

DOCTORS

This popular old author, who prides himself on being at one moment a "good old community boy" -- he flatters himself the next moment, as if it were somehow universally dishonorable to have pursued studies and to write books, that "one" has bestowed him with "these" doctoral efforts.

We need to know, pépé: good or not, all this studying?

In fact, if you've pushed passed that piece of paper, well, those grad students -- you know what shams they are and you'd piss on those puck-heads. They bluff you like you were a virgin, old man; don't you know how to get it up once in a while?

DOS (back)

In the Middle Ages and until the fifteenth century, sodomy was called the "délit de l'épine" (offense of the spine or backbone). The sex and age of that backside mattered little: the Church wanted nothing out of it but the buttocks, those devils. The sacrilege was in making love to the inverse side of the body.

The Abrahamic religions are the only religions in the world that persecute both of masculine rings: prepuce, anus. These savages believe they thereby de-feminize the male body.

In renouncing circumcision, Christianity may appear less barbarous, but it is worse than Judaism and Islam, for it extends its persecution to sexuality in its entirety. The eunuch is the Christian ideal. Saint Paul had already abandoned cutting the foreskin; he exacted more: the cock and the ears.

I've seen voluptuous young Italian boys masturbate within the foreskin, without ever exercising its retraction, so it adheres to the glans; almost resembling phimosis. In reality, it's like a secret vagina, always available at the whim of the egoist member for its caresses.

DOULEUR (pain, suffering, sorrow)

Cruel reality, revolution, earthquake, famine, execution, torture, assassination, butchery of children, spectacular accidents, hideous deformation, senility, sickness, unemployment, vermin, entombment. What pleasure we take in the sight of each other's suffering! It confers upon us the easy lightness of birds. Their desperation consoles us, their drama appeases us, their decrepitude rejuvenates us, their ugliness dignifies our muzzles, their crippled gait makes us dance,, their misery makes the sun shine from our behinds. In the despair of man I enjoy a vitalizing intoxication that I do not acknowledge to myself.

Such enjoyment is so necessary, so universal -- every culture has practiced it, certainly -- it _pacifies_ those who take pleasure in it to such an extent that only an inept moralism would deprive youth, children, the "weak" of it, on t.v. or elsewhere. _They_ need it more than anyone else. To see the real violence of the world renders us milder and more peaceful than submitting to the violence of censorship.

DRESSAGE (training, discipline)

Mother and father unwittingly criticize their children for the very defects, vices, and habits that their children acquired from them involuntarily, whether by heredity or by example. But how sweet it is to keep your likenesses from becoming better than you!

*

In conversation with me, the boy who had a severe, violent father (a neuropath, I think) further multiplies his father's twists, his apologies; he makes objections, inserts parentheticals, overwhelms you with his contemptuousness insistence that *that* word, *that* idea, is too... too... no, that doesn't make sense; didn't mean to insinuate anything, of course... He guards his left, he guards his right, rear, front, and insides; he guards against alarmed looks, blurred words, nervous gestures, and the incessant attacks in which his own discourse bristles up of its own accord.

Yes, it's with his father that he is speaking, with his father that he's fighting. He ignores me; he sees a pair of britches and immediately suffers and is afraid. You'd take him for a lab rat, set up in a Skinner box designed to create a maniac. Set the poor animal free on a bare table, and he only imagines himself again imprisoned in the labyrinth, and, in terror of electric shock, he follows his typical contorted course, his somersaults, his backtracking, his anxious explorations of impasses, corridors, and dangers which no longer exist.
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