Status Updates From The Fan-Maker's Inquisition...

The highlight of the book so far is Sade's imagined carnival Paris, with its weeklong festival of the prostate among other celebrations, and the invention of a new color designated Neptune's balls.

I marked some terrific passages, but the book is on the balcony and it's late. Extremely impressive layers of imagination and the sense that she writes with utter freedom, whatever control she exerts seems more the control of the deeply inhabiting voices she's rendering.

In an interview in his Collidescope published last Sunday, George Salis asked Ducornet about blasphemy. I don't recall the context, but somehow this book didn't come up, which makes me wonder about her other books. Thus far the book is beautifully unrestrained, certainly blashpemous is such is still possible.

One of Rikki's best for sure!

Immersed. Needing nothing more than the magic of her nibbed pen.

This is unbelievable. Talk about timing! (I avoid the treacly 'synergy.') RURD has chapters devoted to both de Sade and Robespierre, while Imperial spent a great deal of time espousing and detailing La Malinche. My reading of this FANTASTIC book is all the richer due to contextual immersion. Thanks WTV and thanks Ducornet. What a month!

Absolutely dreadful cover art. Christ, what did RD do to deserve such a bounty of shitty covers, when she could have done each and every one? I see the previous owner made it all the way to page...15, leaving behind a pink polka dotted bookmark. Likely not enough hot bone action. Score on the bookmark! Yay!

"How lightly you carry the years, mon amie, yes, how very lightly. I think it is because no one has ruled you, not man or god. If only you were a libertine, what a perfect specimen of a woman you would be!"

"The Bible is a pile of dung... The one thoughtful moment is Eve's. Eve, the mother of Juliette. Eve, who never asks 'Why have you forsaken me?' but who walks out of Eden and climbs into bed. Eve, who in full knowledge, fucks and engenders a world."

"'When my pen starts thrashing, it's like fucking a whore in the den of a famished lion. The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted. I am after Vertigo,' Sade said. 'I am wanting a world in which the Forbidden Fruit is ascendant and rises just as the Old Laws fall-yes!'"

"Like a good fuck, a good cup of chocolate starts with a vigorous whipping..."

"What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading."

“We admire Nature’s variety and accept the flowers in their multiplicity of colors; indeed, if all flowers were white, we’d love them less. The world is richer for Nature’s permutations, so why, tell me, do we not accept diversity within our own species?”

“My cannon,” Sade agreed. “I like to force words into collision, to use them the way an executioner uses his bloody gears and blades.” With energy he added: “Writing is my way of defying God. Of spitting every conceivable ‘Thou shalt not’ into God’s face.”

"Now, I know that all I imagine in my worst rages is only a mirror of the world. All day, over and over again, although the rain fell in torrents and the wind sent a bloody water surging into the crowd, Hell materialized beneath my window."

This is the shit.

This is an exquisite immersion in the imagination and world of Sade.

"A fan is like the thighs of a woman..."

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Is this violence the bastard child of one man's rage? If so, all is irreparable, for I have imagined so much. Worse: I have put it to paper!

This is excellent and makes me want to read more Sade (excerpts here and there and about half of Sodom is patently not enough) - perhaps I shall give Justine a go - I have read enough about it from Angela Carter, Byatt and all the others to know there is a lot of interest and importance there.

A birthday present from my lovely co-blogger. It's about the Marquis de Sade and features copious use of the word "bugger". She knows me so well!

Mmmmm . . . yummy beginning to my morning followed by stretching to HOS.com program "Dark Wisdom". Love the description of the ripe fruit falling into the dusty street on p. 66.

A late night - I'm tired. So many aspects to this wonderful book and I've been browsing through my two Marquis de Sade's biographies...What an incredible man...If I could only ever write, I would be in heaven! Thank you Rikki for your wonderful insight. I feel so good now.

Well this is turning out to be a surprising book. Not at all what I expected but still rather exquisite.

They tell me the Hebertistes will lose their heads today; the crowd is the biggest yet, the tower trembles with the people's roars, and each the blade comes crashing down I think I shall go mad. I attempt to write, cannot, put down the pen, pace, turn around and around my chamber pot like a Brahmin circumambulating a sacred shrubbery. Robespierre...will be undone by his own game.

""There is no God...that is why nothing is forbidden."

Back to our Italian voyage. Impervious to the delightful landscapes, the sumptuous woodlands, the picturesque villages, we passed, I, in my sexual impatience and curiosity, could think only of returning to...[the] castle on the hill, to idle away my hours in his...library of incendiary books."

If we exist in a godless universe how should we behave morally?

"...the Revolution has embraced sexual prudery with the same passion a necrophiliac embraces corpses...If I have alienated the entire universe by imagining...little girls, roasted to a turn, I am in point of fact no cannibal. Nor am I, nor have I ever been, a coprophage. Unlike...saints of the Church whose appetites have inspired my most feared and hated works."

Sade, dans La Bastille

I need a breath of fresh air - time to read Ducornet's version of satire for a while....

Landa dreams...that God made the world so small and flat..the surface of the world small and thin, and he-fully dressed in a miter and jeweled ring [and] purple gloves, and rich vestments laden with gold lace and gems-is very, very heavy. Immobile and fearful, he hears the pope's voice..."Venerable brother! Heed the demons!"