luka

Well-known member
baudelaire not so much. the prose stuff translates well. paris spleen. flowers of evil, less so.
 

luka

Well-known member
im going to go to work soon but i'll read it when i get back to keep you company. just put whatever else youve got n to one side and blast through it.
 

luka

Well-known member
i can't let you sit around the house reading ae housman like a daily telegraph reader and giving up on Rimbaud. my conscience wont allow it.
 
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luka

Well-known member
"It is my turn. The story of one of my follies.
For a long time I boasted of having every possible landscape,and found laughable the celebrated names of painting and modern poetry.
I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, back-drops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, old operas, ridiculous refrains, naive rhythms.
I dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics of no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs, displacements of races and continents: I believed in every type of witchcraft."
 

luka

Well-known member
"Poetic old-fashionedness figured largely in my alchemy of the word.
I grew accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, carriages on roads in the sky, a parlour at the bottom of the lake; monsters, mysteries.
The title of a vaudeville conjured up horrors before me.
The I explained my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words!
At the end I looked on the disorder of my mind as sacred. I was idle, a prey to a heavy fever."
 

luka

Well-known member
"I became a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness. Action is not life, but a way of spoiling some force, an enervation.
Morality is a weakness of the brain.
To each being it seemed to me that several other lives were due. This gentleman does not know what he is doing. He is an angel. This family is a litter of dogs. In front of several men, I talked out loud with one moment of one of their other lives. In that way, I loved a pig."

how can you be too tired for that? it's pure joy. it's the best book of poetry there is. it's the only book of poetry. every thing else is flat cola.
 

luka

Well-known member
"Autumn already! - But why regret an eternal sun, if we are committed to the discovery of divine light - far from those who die with the seasons.
Autumn. Our boat, in the motionless mist, turns towards the harbour of wretchedness, the huge city under a sky stained with fire and mud. Ah! the rotten rags, the rain-soaked bread, the drunkeness, the thousand loves that crucified me!"

there's none of that disgusting, lumpen, ponderous thinking needed. nothing to get bogged down by. you just read.
 

luka

Well-known member
""There are countless hallucinations. In truth it is what I have always had: no faith in history and the forgetting of principles. I will not speak of this:
poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest a thousand times over. Let me be as avaricious as the ocean.
Why! The clock of life stopped just now. I am no longer in the world. -
Theology is serious, hell is certainly down below - and heaven up above. -
Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames....

I intend to unveil all mysteries: religious mysteries or those of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, the void. I am the master of hallucinations."
 

luka

Well-known member
that's all from A season in Hell. this is one of the illuminations.

dawn

I have held the summer dawn in my arms.
Nothing moved as yet on the fronts of the palaces. The water was dead.
Swarms of shadows refused to leave the road to the wood. I walked along,
awakening the warm, alive air. Stones looked up, and wings rose up silently.
The first occurrence, in the path already filled with cool white shimmering,
was a flower which told me its name.
I laughed at the blonde waterfall which tumbled down through the pine trees.
At its silver top I recognised the goddess.
Then I took off her veils one by one. In the path, where I waved my arms.
In the field where I gave away her name to the cock. In the city, she fled
between steeples and domes; and running like a beggar along the marble wharves,
I chased her.
Where the road mounts, near a laurel wood, I wrapped her in all her veils and felt
something of the immensity of her body. Dawn and the child
collapsed at the edge of the wood.
On waking, it was midday.
 

luka

Well-known member
Bottom

Reality being too prickly for my lofty character, I became at my lady's
a big blue-gray bird flying up near the mouldings of the ceiling and
dragging my wings after me in the shadows of the evening.
At the foot of the baldaquino supporting her precious jewels and her
physical masterpieces, I was a fat bear with purple gums and thick
sorry-looking fur, my eyes of silver and crystal from the consoles.
Evening grew dark like a burning aquarium.
In the morning - a battling June dawn - I ran to the fields, an ass,
trumpeting and brandishing my grievance, until the Sabines came
from the suburbs to hurl themselves on my chest.


Reality being too prickly for my lofty character is the best line in literature
 

luka

Well-known member
Morning of Drunkeness

My story of the Good and the Beautiful! Terrible fanfare of music where I never lose step! Rack of fairytales! Hurrah! for the miraculous work and for the marvelous body, for the first time! It all began with the laughter of children, and will end there. This poison will still be in my veins even when the fanfare dies away and I return to the earlier discord. And now that I am so worthy of this torture, let me fervently gather in the superhuman promise made to my created body and soul. This promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! They promised me they would bury in the darkness the tree of good and evil, and deport tyrannical codes of honesty so they I may bring forth my very pure love. It all began with feelings of disgust and it ended - since I could not seize its eternity on the spot - it ended with a riot of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of figures and objects from here, be consecrated by the memory of that night. It began in slyness and it came to an end with angels of fire and ice.
Brief night of intoxication, holy night! even if it was only for the mask you bequeathed to us. We assert you, method! I am not forgetting that yesterday you glorified each of our ages. I believe in that poison. I can give all of my existence each day.
Behold the age of Assassins.
 
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