Monday, February 18, 2008

French Existentialist Novel

I just stumbled over to the computer after getting up & taking a Tylenol PM & it's 59 degrees at 5 am. Do you know where your tulip bulbs are? & it's raining & there's a fire engine around the corner.

4:30 pm:
PARIS (Reuters) - Writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, an "enfant terrible" of France's literary establishment who helped found the New Novel school in the 1950s, died on Monday aged 85, his publishers said.

Robbe-Grillet became a cult figure among France's postwar intelligentsia with a genre of novel-writing that rejected conventions such as plot, characterization and emotion.

It effectively launched a type of semi-philosophical fiction in which nothing much happens but a vast amount is noticed, imagined or thought.
I've described my late night radio monologue style as like listening to a bored man with a not-unpleasant voice paraphrase a bad translation of a Robbe-Grillet novel. I felt I could do something to alleviate the sufferings of insomniacs by lulling them into trance states if not putting them to sleep. I described in detail the breakfast buffet at the Sheraton Hotel in Woodbridge NJ. without making the food especially appealing. I explained how I opened, unpacked, checked in & priced a pallet of art books at a retail store. I talked about sitting in an orange beach chair next to Raritan Bay on a calm afternoon with a falling tide & why I liked that particular beach chair. These monologues usually had no connection with the music I was airing, which could be loud & dissonant.

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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson

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