At 7:55 pm, 17 year-old Mariuccia Monteverdi, clad in nothing but skin-tight black neoprene hot pants bearing the legend PLEASE REMOVE BEFORE USE stamped across her arse, threw caution to the wind and extracted the first After Eight from its slender brown envelope, crumpled the wrapper into a dense little ball and then lobbed it with insouciant accuracy into a Murano glass ashtray (we have all experienced these serendipitous moments when eye, hand and mind coincide to banish the gremlins of error and dispatch the arrow, cool as a cucumber, straight to the heart of the astonished bull’s-eye) sitting on top of a squat rectangular coffee-table whose Formica top was printed—black on white—with the following words of the designer Charles Parmentier’s poem Qualities: ‘the coyly palindromic, the kinkily faded, the nervously parched, the sympathetically crippled, the hypothetically arch, the haphazardly burnished, the preposterously svelte, the usefully dysfunctional, the artistically sullen, the heavily dappled, the sanguinely embittered, the salubriously vague, the devilishly emblematic, the transparently brown, the famously obese, the raucously stiff, the presumptuously megalithic, the meekly telescopic, the frenetically safe, the luxuriously sulfurous, the moistly trilingual, the valuably automatic, the passably postglacial, the traumatically obscure, the gluttonously sassy, the tryingly lubricious, the hideously apt, the charmingly aquatic, the vibrantly injured, the wordlessly fallow, the ceaselessly creased, the tenuously umlauted, the viciously blue, the hopefully bandaged, the wishfully comatose, the honorably senile, the icily indicative, the fetchingly square, the mutely divided, the dreadfully spry, the mindlessly cosy, the wistfully sandy, the opulently sticky, the openly arithmetical, the mechanically intimate, the feebly hypnotic, the dopily striped, the winningly vapid, the superbly salty, the facetiously wet, the badly pampered, the densely lewd, the profitably zonked, the anxiously clad, the coldly remunerative, the nicely tumescent, the rapidly belligerent, the mortally outstretched, the cynically laundered, the woefully khaki, the eternally twee, the daringly fluffy, the incorrectly torpid, the shamefully elastic, the drastically gaunt, the ritually subatomic, the congenitally sloppy, the nonchalantly ill, the marginally fuzzy, the debatably fey, the adroitly myopic, the masterfully churly, the successfully slinky, the supposedly tawny, the oddly kinetic, the imperially sad, the absolutely panhuman, the dolefully lax, the wastefully stingy, the arrestingly flounced, the repetitiously obtuse, the adverbially fecund, the charismatically ordinary, the hurtfully pagan, the strikingly plump, the typographically minute, the achingly metallic, the lexicographically inexhaustible, the genuinely dank, the visibly bruised, the angelically horny, the exasperatingly posh, the rewardingly furry, the richly bespectacled, the hyperbolically buxom, the virtually orgasmic, the neverendingly dubious, the tenuously erect, the awkwardly tepid, the variably mournful, the imperiously bluff, the classically putrid, the safely spasmodic, the cryptically sexy, the shamelessly vulpine, the regionally rhythmic, the traditionally absent, the sluttishly becoming, the haughtily elegiac, the syntactically chaotic, the inadequately woeful, the verbally arid, the attractively stunted, the tearfully tetchy, the unwaveringly irreverent, the tauntingly facile, the simply serendipitous, the arguably nepotistic, the victoriously stamped.’

Some of you may recall that at last year’s auction of Classic Automobiles and Automobiliana celebrated at Sotheby’s in London, lot nº 129—a powder blue 1954 Pegaso Z-102 ‘Thrill’ Berlinetta with coachwork by Touring of Milan, formerly the property of the late Contessa Zanetti (née Ilka Monteverdi) and offered for sale by her executors with a healthy reserve of £195,000—provoked a furious bidding duel before a breathless audience, the ærodynamic Spanish coupé finally being adjudicated for the astronomical sum of £470,000 to the distinguished Lesbian dodecaphonic composer Flaminia de Plunkett, ultimately more energetic with her paddle than her tenacious rival, the Munich gallery owner and former lover of the late Contessa, Carlo Kitzler, whose purely sentimental motivations—he fondly rembered one brisk late-summer evening in 1957, slumped in the passenger seat of the vehicle, his head swimming in champagne as Ilka, divinely naked and fragrant beneath a knee-length ocelot coat after having left the Count to play with his cénacle of ephebes aboard their motor yacht Parnasso, thundered along the autostrada above Portofino at 200 km/h, laughing like a lunatic—were no match for Miss de Plunkett’s iron determination, the external sign of an æsthetic passion whose intensity was unsuspected until the tragic double suicide by morphine overdose just three months later that claimed the lives of the composer—later revealed to be in the terminal phase of bone-marrow cancer—and her inseparable sentimental companion, the militant mosaicist Jacqueline Gwynne, and the subsequent revelation that for some time the two artistes had been morbidly designing and calculating down to the last detail the mise en scène of their suicide, funeral and entombment, having even commissioned the modish illustrator Olivier Daubigny-Daubrée to execute an admirable series of thirty-six cross-hatched colour drawings in his usual photographic style, each drawing supplemented by copious text containing precise directions for the actualization of their macabre project, from the chilling scene in which Flaminia and Jacqueline are seen mutually administering the lethal intravenous shots with silver syringes, through the half-dozen vignettes cinematographically depicting the funeral procession (the rustic roadside church with its black Madonna; the biomorphic ‘Siamese twin’ coffins decorated with a marquetry mosaic of rare woods and suspended sidecar-fashion between two vintage black flat-twin BMW motorcycles; the all-woman orchestra assembled to perform La Toison d’Or, the song-cycle based on poems by Diana Schnell that first rocketed de Plunkett to fame), to the final suite of drawings detailing the extravagant décor of the burial chamber itself, a subterranean vault beneath the garden of their villa on the island of Ischia, in which the two lovers are embalmed and hermetically isolated behind a vast sheet of plate glass, Jacqueline at the wheel of the Pegaso, immaculate in chauffeur’s cap with patent leather visor, tasselled cyclamen uniform and black leather driving gloves, and Flaminia seated beside her, bare-shouldered in a floral sundress, her lips vibrantly painted, her face glamorously masked by a pair of green-tinted tortoiseshell sunglasses and by her favourite vintage Hermès foulard, decorated with repeated starfish motifs and knotted beneath the chin, thereby half-obscuring what is actually a flame-red wig, custom-made to hide a scalp left bald by months of chemotherapy.

Silent Might (1916), a sombre and powerful monochromatic depiction of a fleet of British dreadnoughts purposefully cleaving the icy waters in the bluish penumbra of dawn or dusk, is doubtless one of Bernard F. Gribble’s most celebrated canvases—widely reproduced in its day (‘by permission of His Majesty the King’), the latent jingoism of the painting’s subject was reinforced by a rhetorical legend invoking ‘[the] silent and powerful guardians of the sanctity of the Empire’s island home and protectors of her commerce on the boundless deep’—, a work whose very celebrity has been fostered by its prominent exhibition in the the main wing of the Imperial War Museum, an institution whose hallowed halls recently reverberated to the unseemly scandal caused by the casual discovery that this paean to British naval prowess had been secretly tampered with and that Gribble’s gloomy brushwork had been overlaid by a foreign and—as a cursory inspection of the canvas once it was removed from the wall revealed—recent hand whose uncanny alteration of the original—imperceptible at a passing glance, the figures being secondary in the general composition—had turned the two vigilant mariners at the bow of the battleship into lovers exchanging a passionate kiss, this subtle subversion causing the IWM’s director Sir Cedric Glasscock to order an internal security investigation that soon revealed the discovery of a second altered painting (the Service Regulations Manual being confidentially passed by one slender lipsticked WAAF to another in the staff canteen in Sir Lawrence (‘Larry’) Driscoll’s brittle academic exercise of 1943 had been deadpanly tranformed into Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) and ended with the formulation of the inescapable hypothesis of a militant band of highly organized anti-war homosexuals having infiltrated Museum personnel, at which stage Scotland Yard was called in to further an inquiry that ultimately threw suspicion on a newly hired museum guard, Kelvyn Rimm, whose Bayswater bedsitter, promptly raided by the men from the Yard, threw up pamphlets, T-shirts, badges and bumper-stickers produced under the auspices of the so-called Pansy Power Putsch (PPP), a group advocating—in an arcane jargon that meant precious little to Constable Plod—‘the (re)articulation of queer representation via dadaist-cum-situationist cultural praxis’ and counting amongst its adherents the professional art-forger Icarus Lam, already sought by Europol for questioning in relation to the Cedric Quartis-Jones paedophile murder case and whose subsequent implication in the IWM affair resulted in Scotland Yard surrendering its jurisdiction in the matter and shunting the dossier over to Europol’s Detective-Inspector Duncan Stalker who, after vigorously grilling Rimm, came to the conclusion that the PPP, while indubitably vandalistic in intent, was nevertheless inspired by benign—and from a certain point of view, laudable—theoretical urges whereas Lam, whose affiliation with the ideology of the PPP was merely tangential, appeared more and more as a dark master of deceit (not for nothing had he assumed the pseudonym of ‘René Schwarz’), a pasticheur and counterfeiter of genius whose diabolical talent had for some time been stealthily subverting the markets of art, philately and numismatics.

The sleepy tranquillity of the French spa town of D… was clamorously disturbed recently when a gang of so-called Holy Rollers—ritually tattooed anarchist girls from the outlying suburbs, their nipple-rings perversely profiled beneath tight latex bodysuits, their nerves taut from ingesting massive doses of homemade crystal methedrine fabricated in their clubhouse (a deconsecrated presbytery left immaculate in the wake of frequent amphetamine binges)—thundered into town on their souped-up Vespas and lobbed a brash brick through the window of V8, a store specializing in ‘20th century artefacts’ (the proprietors, Randy Pfister and Todd McQueen, having for some years been at the forefront of their field in New York with a store of the same name, had moved its contents virtually holus-bolus to the pilgrim town when AIDS-stricken Randy, an ardent Roman Catholic tired of the depressing diet of drugs he was being administered, opted for the obscure promise of faith healing), from which they proceeded to loot various randomly selected items, including an irreplaceable collection of fifty-three postcards of motorcades, formerly in the possession of King Farouk; a child’s kite from Weimar Germany, its plywood frame colourfully papered with billions of inflated marks; a drawing by Olivier Daubigny-Daubrée depicting a desktop scattered with pens and ink pots, on which an art deco statuette of a female figure-skater functions as a paperweight holding down one of Daubigny-Daubrée’s own unfinished sketches, a meticulous cross-hatched representation of a philatelist, tweezers in hand, seated at an ornate desk in a book-lined study; the first commercially produced Biro; a gouache dated 1937, bearing the stamp of the Winston Craven industrial design studio and illustrating a delirious proposal for a high-speed covered chrome and aluminium moving footway linking Brooklyn and Manhattan; and unique color super 8 footage of the 1961 tragedy involving the Black Hornets, the precision flying team of the Royal Nigerian Air Force, a crack British-trained élite under the command of Squadron Leader Edward Oldibiri, a brilliant ex-Oxonian who reluctantly interrupted a promising thesis devoted to—ironically enough—the Icarus myth in 20th century English literature in order to join the RNAF, a decision that did not spell total disengagement from his first love, as was demonstrated in somewhat tragic circumstances on 13th January, 1961, date of the first annual aerial display in Lagos and, incidentally, the twentieth anniversary of James Joyce’s death, a coincidence that inspired Oldibiri to conceive and execute an unusual homage in the form of an aerobatic skywriting demonstration, a display described by the verbally agile airman as ‘supersonic and boustrophedonic’ and that was to consist of the four Black Hornets in their Hawker Hunters simultaneously tracing allotted portions of the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake from alternate directions in the serene azure sky high above the Gulf of Guinea, explicit instructions being given to ignore punctuation marks unless they wanted to ‘comma cropper’, a warning taken to heart by both Tunji Gabangida and Ibrahim Abiola but studiously ignored by the youngest Hornet, William Abayomi, who, while impeccably inscribing his assigned text, insisted upon vaingloriously supplying a mid-line pause, a flourish that caused his wingtip to brush Gabangida’s and thereby precipitate the fiery plunge earthwards of both jets before a horrified crowd of spectators conservatively estimated at 25,000.

As majority shareholder in Genevoise des Pompes Funèbres, a prosperous funeral business founded by his maternal grandfather Alois Graber in 1919, Felix Zeichen (1949-2007) combined wealth and eccentricity in equal degree. Packed off to California by his father to study state-of-the-art undertaking methods in the early 1970s, Zeichen did his best to comply with the paternal injunction while at the same time contriving to spend a considerable portion of his time on Catalina Island where, following an enthusiastic initial visit, he purchased Holly Hill House, a quaint hillside dwelling with a green- and red-striped conical cupola, built in 1889 by one Peter Gano with the assistance—as legend would have it—of his blind horse Mercury. (more…)

Sound the bugle, don’t come near.
Mr. Newton is sick beyond description.
Do you understand English?
Mr. Newton is sick beyond description.
In my head there is great pain.
Come at once, apply the butter.
Where is the motor? Have you any tea?
Note it down, note it down :

Ruby giddiness is coming
Spider there is great pain
Ink in the North
Coal in the South
Blind in the East
Wound in the West
Darkness from London to Paris
Swelling the Ganges and the Indus
Thunder one-by-one
Lightning two-by-two

Get the motor ready. Light the lamp.
Mr. Williams is sick beyond description.
God preserve you! There is no God.
There is God. There is no God.
In my head the air is motionless.
In that manner the fire goes out.
The water is dirty. The sky is clear.
Note it down, note it down :

Signature she speaks the truth
Crocodile the sky is clear
Steel my friend is ugly
Throat your daughter is beautiful
Cup the horse is vicious
Heaven it is under consideration
Saucer the knife is blunt
Hell you have a gun
Telegram milk is white
Mosquito you begin to write

In Germany, the phenomenon of Geistfahrer (literally ‘ghost drivers’), those disenchanted citizens of our soulless consumer society who find a therapeutic outlet for their lack of mental equilibrium by driving at maximum velocity on the wrong side of the autobahn, thereby seeking to provoke devastating head-on collisions or simply scare the living daylights out of motorists travelling in the opposite direction, claimed another three victims in mysterious and somewhat atypical fashion late last year in Babelsburg when a bright-blue bubble-car, a droning insect scuttling along at its modest top speed of eighty-five kilometers per hour, both puny glow-worm headlights extinguished, strayed blithely into the flight path of a thundering Maserati Mistrale Spyder estimated to be travelling at three times the speed, thereby provoking a monstrous accident in which the quaint three-wheeler virtually disintegrated on impact, while the klaxonning Italian convertible left the road in a violent sideways skid that catapulted it into the scenery, instantly killing both the driver, identified from documents in the glove box (the remains of which concealed, just incidentally, €35,000 in hard currency and several grams of angel dust) as Bruno Kitzler, son of the Munich gallery owner Carlo Kitzler, nightclub denizen, and creative director of the avant-garde fashion brand UN|AVAILABLE, along with his glamorous passenger, actress Sylvie Lartigue, familiar to cinephiles as the deadpan erotic protagonist of such films as Nitroglycerine, Babyslitter, Sexy Safari, Comme Tu Me Veux and Arse Poetica, and more recently director herself of Near Misses, a wise, brave, funny, insightful and ultimately award-winning documentary about transsexuals in the final phase of gender reassignation that gave the lie to the cynics who said she was just another pretty face, an assertion they would hardly have dared to uphold in the aftermath of the accident, given that Mlle. Lartigue was unequivocally decapitated in the collision, an event whose consequences the artist has depicted with the same frigid and obsessive attention to detail perceptible in his rendering of the broken steering wheel against which Bruno Kitzler’s bloodstained forehead has come to rest (the trident motif of the Maserati marque can actually be deciphered—or perhaps intuited rather than deciphered), in the bloodstained chrome and leather of the gran turismo dashboard, in the ocelot-patterned fur coat that has slipped from Mlle. Lartigue’s headless shoulders to morbidly reveal the generous contours of what is or was quite possibly a surgically enhanced left breast, and last but not least, in the painter’s signature itself, the name ‘Victor Stamp’ being executed in a painstaking calligraphic style and artfully duplicated, signwriter-fashion, by its own drop shadow, a detail which lends it an illusory three-dimensionality and which provided Darby Brady, the Bystander art critic standing by me on the evening of the vernissage, with an occasion for much portentous and loud-voiced theorizing, conducted largely for the benefit of the tousle-haired, leather-clad ephebe accompanying him and subsiding only momentarily when he imperiously halted a white-jacketed waiter and scooped his umpteenth glass of mediocre chablis from a silver tray.

Let me be blunt. Chad Brunt’s recent ‘novel’ Dandruff on a Black Lacoste (Hypergram Press) is for the most part a trivial, plotless farrago of postmodernist conceits, conceits that extend beyond the text itself to the author’s own smart-arse jacket design and the astute buzz-marketing campaign—devised by Brussels-based boutique agency threedaybeard—that generated such unwarranted word of mouse in the first place. And yet despite the book’s blatant shortcomings, there is one passage that not only deserves to be amply quoted, but in fact gains from it: that in which anti-hero Adam Zurz, a deviant downshifter whose alphabet-encompassing initials are the pretext for much verbal pyrotechnics on the author’s part, is subjected to the demented patter of his boss, Charles Sayer. (more…)

As his interview with Monseigneur Brugevin drew to a close in the primate’s vast book-lined Parisian study cluttered with African and Polynesian masks and other artefacts of diverse provenance, Dr Alexandre Sakaroff felt he had excellent grounds for optimism. Just three years after the hecatomb of the Great War with its tragic depletion of French manhood and the corresponding slump in natality, it was abundantly clear to the urbane and enlightened prelate sitting opposite him that while the Church alone could attend to the spiritual hunger fomented by so much suffering, only Science was in a position to find treatments to palliate the dreadful physical loss the nation had suffered. Indeed, this idealistic alliance between the forces of Faith and Progress, informed by a patriotism à toute épreuve, formed the well-springs of the Monseigneur’s world-view.

(more…)

In the late 1960s identical twins Jean-Pierre and Jean-Paul Kessel were catapulted to minor stardom as juvenile ping-pong prodigies, alternating their conventional doubles prowess with trick acrobatic exhibitions that confirmed their uncanny mastery of the medium. Their interest in the game was awakened at the age of eight in the course of an English lesson delivered by Jeremy Booth-Clifford, at the time a bohemian student of international law supplementing his meagre scholarship money by giving private language lessons, but later to become one of London’s most prominent and certainly most flamboyant barristers, despite having been tragically blinded after staring at the sun while acid-tripping at Stonehenge in 1971. (more…)

The next illustration—banal or confused to the cursory glance of the naked eye, but rich in lazy detail under the patient scrutiny of the magnifying glass—purports to show the distinguished but highly unorthodox French philatelist André (‘Dédé’) Levieux (1956-2003), cozily ensconced one midwinter’s evening in a dilapidated bottle-green leather wing-chair, a cigarette snoozing between two nicotine-stained fingers while snow falls dreamily outside the window, and tranquilly perusing what are technically but somewhat tediously known as the quadrille-ruled white cartridge leaves of a leather-bound springback album housing what is in all probability a recently acquired portion of his eclectic and taxonomically perverse collection, an idiosyncratic sample of postal history that ranges from the queer perforation of an overprinted Tasmanian penny pink to the aberrant cancellation obliterating the tireless toil of a bare-torsoed Cuban cane-cutter; from the millimetric marmoreal effigies of bewhiskered generals and austere heads-of-state long since consigned to oblivion, to the frozen heroics of Communist speedskaters and tête-bêche Olympic bobsledders; from the self-referentiality of a stylized 1955 ten-pfennig West German carrier pigeon to the self-abnegation of a 1957 five-franc Belgian nurse (the snowy folds of her immaculately starched uniform are tucked tight at the bodice to reveal a surprisingly ample bosom which, despite its infinitesimal delineation, can still provoke a pang in certain amateurs) preserved for posterity as she dutifully stoops to bandage the leprous limb of a pitiable wild-eyed Congolese native in a Leopoldville lazaret, this ‘inch-square pageant’ (to quote Adam Snow’s Par Avion) emitting that unmistakeable aroma of colonial nostalgia familiar to many philatelists and certainly to Dédé Levieux who, entranced since solitary poliomeyelitic childhood by malarial swamps, pith helmets, rubber trees and sturdy smiling indigenes, casts a lingering and appreciative gaze upon the specimen at hand, no doubt mentally commemorating the fact—known to only a scarce handful of specialists—that just nine months after the taking of the photograph on which the lithographic engraving for the issue was based, the nurse depicted—a certain Marcelle Broodthaers, sturdy Flemish-speaking native of canal-crossed Bruges—was, along with two young compatriots, brutally and repeatedly profaned and violated before being dismembered and finally eaten by troops loyal to the charismatic Congolese rebel leader Herbert Obango, troops who, without the slightest compunction and evidently performing under the influence of hallucinogenic herbs or whatnot, stormed the Red Cross dispensary of the colonial capital and proceeded to assuage their bestial urges, thereby provoking the first symptom of a paroxysm of violence that eventually led to the relinquishing of Belgian sovereignty and the establishment of an independent state, a long and cruel process that forms, as it were, an invisible watermark underwriting the surface of what is to many merely another picturesque and inoffensive postage stamp.

Szczepanski (but was that really his name?) gazed blankly at the screen of his computer. An ice-blue icosahedron in perpetual motion was tumbling slowly through sidereal space, randomly revolving to display its twenty facets and playfully bouncing off the walls of the screen, set on its course for all eternity. As he surrendered himself to the geometric fatality of the figure’s trajectory, losing himself in a warm narcotic trance, Szczepanski realized he wouldn’t at all mind being that icosahedron. (more…)

With the thumb and index finger of your right hand, you pick up a pair of round-tipped, six-inch, ‘professional length’ philatelic tweezers and carefully extract the final stamp on the plastic display page from its rectangular compartment. Then you take the frameless acrylic-lensed magnifying glass in your left hand and examine the stamp carefully. (more…)

Hitchcock awoke with a dream hard-on and no-one to use it on.

Facing my reflection in the full-length mirror of the bathroom at half-past seven this morning and wearing nothing but an old navy-blue T-shirt bearing the word TROUBADOUR in white copperplate lettering, the bottom part of which was distended by a sizeable but perceptibly declining erection, I recited the abovementioned sentence—the opening gambit of my long-meditated work of fiction—seven times, theatrically modulating my voice with each iteration and ending with an hysterical falsetto I judged totally inappropriate. (more…)

Reciprocal integers were still an unknown quantity to our sixth-grade class the day the school principal Mr Hassell walked in and held up a sixpenny snack pack of Cottee’s sultanas, promising it to the first boy or girl who came to his office and told him what multiplicand of 5/8 resulted in a product of 1. (more…)

En France, la chasse est un sport très populaire. Roger Barin, jeune Français de dix-sept ans, va souvent à la chasse. Mais écoutez…en ce moment un de ses camarades lui parle…
— Que feras-tu demain, Roger ?
— Demain je me lèverai très tôt…aussitôt que le soleil se lèvera. Je déjeunerai, je prendrai mon fusil et ma gibecière, et puis je partirai à la chasse.
— Est-ce que tu emmèneras quelqu’un avec toi ?
— Oui. J’emmènerai avec moi ma jeune soeur Amélie. Pendant que je chasserai, elle cueillera des fleurs vénéneuses, qui abondent dans la forêt.
— A quelle heure rentreras-tu à la maison ?
— Je ne sais pas au juste…lorsque j’aurai tué deux ou trois femmes, je suppose.

Amidst the usual commercial dross in the mail this morning I found a letter addressed to the former tenant and franked with three rather ancient oblongular Spanish stamps, none of which had been obliterated for some incomprehensible reason, thereby rendering it impossible to decide whether it had been posted recently or at some time in the more or less distant past, or whether it had been posted at all and not simply dropped in the mailbox by someone other than the postman. (more…)

Il était cinq heures du soir. L’autobus pour Saint-Chalais passait lentement par les rues animées de la ville. Il faisait très froid et il pleuvait à verse. Tous les voyageurs portaient des vêtements chauds, car on était au milieu de l’hiver. M. Ravel, lui, avait son pardessus épais, et son écharpe de laine. De sa place, au fond de l’autobus, il regardait distraitement par la fenêtre. Il était très fatigué après une longue journée de travail.
Que la vie est monotone, pensait-il. Me voici encore une fois, dans le même autobus, à la même heure !
Oui, pour M. Ravel, la vie de tous les jours était vraiment monotone…Chaque matin, il quittait la maison à huit heures moins dix, il prenait toujours son autobus au même endroit et il arrivait toujours à son bureau à huit heures et demie. Là, il faisait toujours le même travail, abordait les mêmes problèmes, voyait les mêmes visages. A cinq heures précises, il mettait son chapeau, quittait le bureau, traversait la rue et attendait son autobus au même arrêt.
Mais les autres voyageurs, que faisaient-ils ? Une vieille dame tricotait un pull à trois bras ; un monsieur bien habillé fumait tranquillement un joint; deux étudiants faméliques échangaient des idées sur le néant. Mais la plupart des voyageurs lisaient Les Fleurs du Mal.
Oui, la vie est monotone, se disait M. Ravel. Mais je serai chez moi dans quinze minutes. Que ce sera bon d’ôter ces vêtements mouillés et d’endosser mon manteau de vison et mon porte-jarretelles!

Rummaging this rainy afternoon through the Wunderkammer of my chaotic mind, I picked up and assembled the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, an irresistible retro trifle offering a panoramic view of a Californian forest fire threatening the late 1950’s American suburban dream. Picture this: The blaze is raging at left of picture against a background of snow-capped mountain peaks. Two military helicopters hover overhead, surveying a stream of cars wending their way up the hillside, roof-racks packed with belongings salvaged from the flames. Framed between two palm trees, a deserted swimming pool with diving-board, water slide and deck chairs perched on the perimeter is visible at a lower level of a luxuriant landscaped garden, poignant emblem of Eden on the verge of incineration. At right of picture, in the foreground of the composition, a police motorcyclist sits astride his mount at the top of a driveway, gesturing back down the path. Gesturing to what or whom, however, it is impossible to say, since his shiny knee-high leather boot, partially obscuring the chrome exhaust-pipe, marks the boundary of the completed portion of the puzzle and his motorcycle remains deprived of front wheel and environs.

Par quelque jour enbaumé et printanier de 1954, la voyageuse était assise, songeuse et distraite, dans la vaste salle à manger du palatial Hôtel Miramonti-Majestic à Cortina d’Ampezzo, caressant l’idée de s’attaquer à un plat tiède et touristique de paglia e fieno (à sa gauche, le comte Zanetti, cinq doigts effilés aux ongles irréprochablement soignés lui effleurant la cuisse à l’occasion; a sa droite, Carlo Kitzler, une chaussure de daim tabac à semelle de crêpe recherchant à tâtons au-dessous de la table son pied déchaussé et gainé de soie; et en face d’elle, Clizia Kitzler, deux yeux verts et légèrement exopthalmiques illuminés d’une discrète lueur sapphique), sans entretenir le moindre soupçon qu’au-delà du ronronnement sophistiqué et polyglotte de la sala da pranzo lambrissée de bois précieux, au-delà du jardin soigneusement entretenu de l’hôtel lui-même, bien au-delà, certes, du champ de visibilité des puissantes jumelles Zeiss aveuglément dissimulées dans un pimpant étui de cuir suspendu au dos de la chaise du comte; à une altitude d’environ 2.200 mètres, en fait, sur l’imposante paroi nord d’une des Alpes Dolomitiques plus hautes et plus escarpées, une plaque perfide de verglas signifierait d’un moment à l’autre le désastre définitif pour un tel Vittorio Querciotti, et que le jeune alpinista—qui jouissait, entre parenthèses, d’une beauté hors du commun—tomberait sans plus de façons dans le vide vertigineux, sa chute épouvantable gravée à jamais dans les yeux horrifiés et lunettés de son frère jumeau Italo, lequel, jetant le blâme de l’accident fatal, non sur un manque de prudence de la part de Vittorio (malgré sa jeunesse il était beaucoup trop expérimenté pour cela), mais sur la prise insuffisante fournie par les bottes qu’il chaussait, consacrerait d’une façon tout à fait altruiste les dix-huit mois suivants de sa vie—une vie tragiquement raccourcie à peine cinq ans après (en même temps que celle de Fulvia Falco, starlette évaporée à la poitrine avantageuse) quand la Lancia Aurelia Spider qu’il pilotait, entra dans le décor et heurta un platane sur la Via Flaminia—à la conception et à la fabrication d’une semelle de caoutchouc vulcanisé (baptisée la « V.Q. » en tendre hommage phonético-monogrammatique à son frère défunt, marque déposée distinguible d’une pléthore d’imitations inférieures par la répétition graphique d’un cristal de neige), qui améliorait dramatiquement l’adhésion à n’importe quelle surface glissante et qui non seulement contribuerait à sauver la vie d’autres alpinistes hypothétiquement beaux au cours de leurs escalades périlleuses, mais finirait par s’incorporer à diverses chaussures conçues sans tenir en compte les rigueurs spécifiques des hautes altitudes inclémentes, témoin ces robustes brogues anglaises enjolivées de perforations décoratives que je porte à longueur de journée, m’arrêtant rarement pendant mes pérégrinations pour réfléchir qu’une lointaine mort alpine est mystérieusement inscrite dans leur semelle à dessin géométrique et dans le fac-similé poignant—espèce de fossile éphémère—qu’elle communique au sable mouillé, au sol détrempé, à la neige fraîche.

Se lever, faire sa toilette et puis attendre quelque
variété imprévue de cafard ou d’effroi.
—Cioran

The exploits of Spain’s so-called ‘sexy army’ (ejército sexy) in the former Caribbean colony of Gauloise are unknown to the immense majority of human beings—to all in fact except A., who wrote this new chapter in military and colonial history shortly before waking one morning. While the substance of these undertakings was only sketchily evoked and rapidly disposed with by the dream machine, he nevertheless had the opportunity to briefly visit the island in question, most notably the embarcadero (he distinctly remembered the word on awakening), where he was instructed to take a ticket for the port of Churchill while being insistently and shamelessly caressed by a pneumatic brunette sporting diaphanous silver tunic, wedge-heeled gladiator sandals and Bella Darvi make-up. (more…)