Thread by @dean_frey

"Readers are a suspicious lot (the history of reading gives them ample reason). I would prefer to be believed."
- Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London
amzn.to/2SKIO1D

Roubaud expressed a belief in the necessity of maintaining poetry “as an art, a craft, a passion, a game, an irony, a form of research, an insight, a violence, an independent endeavor, & a way of being.”
- Jacques Jouet
📷 Jacques Roubaud by Jean-Luc Bertini
@holdengraber

Jouet discusses Roubaud's genealogy: "Queneau rather than Breton, & the American objectivists rather than the Beat Generation, but also Jane Austen rather than Balzac, Gertrude Stein rather than Joyce...."
dalkeyarchive.com/reading-jacque…
📷 Jacques Roubaud by Isabelle Simon, Paris, 2008

Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London has a section entitled "A library is always expanding" that's relevant to the recent @MarieKondo "ignite sparks of joy" discussion.

But Roubaud quotes Georges Perec; like all Oulipians Roubaud & Perec are all about restraints. Perec was searching for "an ideal library, or at least a sufficient one."

Surprisingly, Roubaud ends in support of a distributed library rather than a personal one:
"Gradually I arrived at this idea, namely, that I'm not someone with a library."

This is what we decided when we downsized from a house in Alberta to a condo in Victoria. Two librarians, but no big personal library. Instead we have access to a great public library system @GVPL, university library @UVicLib, Interlibrary Loans, and a big eBook collection.

"The Great Fire of London (Le Grand Incendie de Londres) has recently been abridged by Roubaud to Gril—not Gil, Gril: Roubaud is stretching himself over the coals." - Jacques Jouet
Photo: Louise Oligny, Paris, 2018

That reminds me of a Billy Wilder story: on his first visit to the salon of Salka & Berthold Viertel in Santa Monica, Wilder met Lubitsch, Garbo, Chaplin, Arthur Rubinstein & many others. And once, "an unkempt guy in the backyard grilling on the BBQ": Bertolt Brecht.