Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Raymond Queneau on his birthday 🎂
📷 Robert Doisneau, 1956
"Queneau’s thinking did not always follow the ways of his century, but his writing unmistakably *belongs* to that century, & indeed often seems to anticipate it."
- Jordan Stump

Raymond Queneau was called by Le Monde "the most universal mind of our time." He was apparently an accomplished painter!
Here's a self-portrait from 1947.

Raymond Queneau by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1963
"True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love."

Robert Doisneau's contact sheet for his portrait session with Raymond Queneau, May 31, 1956, near rue Reuilly. The best shot is at the top of this thread.
Two of my heroes!

Raymond Queneau
Untitled
"The world is not what it seems - but it isn't anything else, either."

Raymond Queneau
Terrain vague, c.1948, gouache
"One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen."

The Eiffel Tower is losing its hair
this is a spinster's filamentary issue
Christ is also the filial issue of a spinster
go translate that into French for me!
- Raymond Queneau, The Translatory Tower

📷 André Kertész, 1929

Raymond Queneau by Boris Lipnitzki, Paris, 1954
"Queneau was one of those writers who knew pretty much everything there was to know about literature, but he also loved word games, and the language of the streets."
- Nicholas Lezard

Raymond Queneau by Jacques Haillot
One of the words that Queneau added to the French language, half-borrowed from English: "le queneau-coutte" (the blow that horizontalises heavyweights).

Raymond Queneau by David Levine

Raymond Queneau collaborated with Jean Tinguely in the 7th of his Metamatics, utilizing the Méta-Matic Drawing Machine, 1967

Raymond Queneau & François Le Lionnais created Oulipo, an experimental writing group that still exists today.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
I've never seen a key for this photo, but I recognize Italo Calvino & Harry Mathews on the left, & Georges Perec behind Queneau.

In the late 1960s I read Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro in Barbara Wright's translation, published by Bodley Head in 1960, & it's always been hugely important to me. One of the funniest of the great novels.
amzn.to/2RJPxIf

Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro was made into a wonderful film by Louis Malle. I watch this regularly, recently on @criterionchannl

"Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears." - Raymond Queneau
I've often wondered if Louis Malle knew these photo-booth shots of Queneau from 1928 ("photomaton" in French).