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Des Esseintes ( i think that's his name) is one of my favorite lit figures. He's kind of the first literary dandy, kind of like de Quincey or the French aristocrat who wrote the first book about dandyism (hard name to recall). That whole fin-de-siecle idea of destroying yourself with excess has disappeared i think. It's unfortunate. Maybe hip hop portrays capitalism in that way. I wanted to be des Esseintes for a long time. never guilded any turtles, but i do have an aquarium full of artwork, a live scorpion and various Star Wars figure, so there you go.
Some people count Holderlin (1770-1843) as a proto-modernist. His late poetry is allegedly the product of schizophrenia (he's also considered one of the first diagnosed schizophrenics - this was based on a kind of sketchy theory i read about in a book called Madness and Modernism).But to me the whole lineage gets tangled when you throw in people like Holderlin, Laurence Sterne, de Sade, or even something like Noh theatre (Pound's translations of Noh plays are excellent). No one talks about creating a new aesthetic, or experimenting with new forms, in the modernist sense until Rimbaud and his proteges (Mallarme and the Symbolists, the German Expressionists, the Surrealists).
Some people count Holderlin (1770-1843) as a proto-modernist. His late poetry is allegedly the product of schizophrenia (he's also considered one of the first diagnosed schizophrenics - this was based on a kind of sketchy theory i read about in a book called Madness and Modernism).But to me the whole lineage gets tangled when you throw in people like Holderlin, Laurence Sterne, de Sade, or even something like Noh theatre (Pound's translations of Noh plays are excellent). No one talks about creating a new aesthetic, or experimenting with new forms, in the modernist sense until Rimbaud and his proteges (Mallarme and the Symbolists, the German Expressionists, the Surrealists).
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