Yeah, but what really is French Weird?
Unpacking oddball music, outsider art and how this might work
Hello,
I had intended that this newsletter would lie dormant for a while, picking up subscribers here and there, me leaking out vague and mysterious updates from time to time. I hadn’t reckoned for an influx of subscribers in the first few hours. Say it quietly, but I’m excited; your generosity has inspired me to outline in a little more detail what you might be able to expect from French Weird: you’re surely entitled to that and I’m exceedingly happy to deliver.
Quite simply, I’m following an instinct with this project. I don’t yet have a fully-formed goal outside of an imagined vision of a book, just a hunch that there is something pretty weird about France, the country I’ve called my home since 2009. Don’t get me wrong, I love living here, raising my daughter here. I think, though that part of the reason I love living here is part of the texture of weirdness that permeates much of life. I’m originally from the UK, which has its own weirdness, especially in 2022, but I’m interested in how the idea of weirdness might help us understand better and articulate the place I live.
There’ll be time enough in the future for us to think about the word “weird” and the process of “weirding”, but that seems a little heavy for the first week of January. For now, a few examples which I hope will give you an idea of where I’m coming from will have to suffice. I’m mostly wanting, with French Weird, I think, to explore modern and contemporary France, so from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Discussions of French weirdness often seem to get caught up in the canonical nineteenth century, the poems of Baudelaire, the fiction of Huysmans and Maupassant, or in the equally canonical Surrealist moment of the early twentieth century. This is all hugely important stuff, but there are enough specialists writing and thinking about this area; I don’t need to add to it here. That’s not to say I won’t drawn from it, but I’m interested in the outside, the liminal, the work that falls through the cracks, what the academy ignores. The ranting of the man or woman in the bar as much as the scholarly symposium paper. In thinking and writing though all of this stuff, my hunch also tells me that some kind of clearer conceptual shape will emerge.
Some quick examples of what the French Weird might encompass:
The frères Bogdanov, Igor and Grichka. Twins born in 1949, familiar faces on French TV from the 1970s, popularising science and science fiction. They became distinctive and notorious for their apparent experimentations with botox and cosmetic surgery. Both died in January 2022, reportedly from Covid-19 after apparently refusing vaccinations.
Vomir, aka, Romain Perrot. French experimental music hero. Notorious for the development of Harsh Noise Wall anti-music anti-genre. Performs with a plastic shopping bag on his head.
Gisèle Vienne. Choreographer, director and sometime puppeteer. Has collaborated with writer Dennis Cooper and guitarist Stephen O’Malley.
Un Regard moderne. Legendary weirdo bookshop housed on the Paris Left Bank on rue Gît-le-Cœur, the same street as the former Beat hotel. I used to be glowered at regularly by late owner Jacques Noël, over piles of esoterica, magical handbooks and Japanese pornography.
Magma, French prog rock collective led by drummer Christian Vander. They sing in Kobaïan, a language he invented.
Michel Houellebecq. Contemporary French novelist. Regularly described as France’s greatest living writer. His first book was an in-depth study of H.P Lovecraft. His most recent novel, Anéantir includes pentagrams, Satanism and extended considerations of The Matrix trilogy.
The Minitel. The proto-internet developed and introduced in 1980 by France Telecom and La Poste. Many homes and post offices had terminals which users used to order food, book train tickets and to chat sexy with strangers. The service, of which Michel Houellebecq was a fan, was retired in the 2010s.
La Femme. French psych-pop band formed in Biarritz in 2010.
On this grey Thursday morning, writing from my daughter’s bedroom in a second-floor apartment in the douzième arrondissement of Paris, it seems to me that there are two clear paths emerging through French Weird. One of these explores how France digests, reworks and rerepresents the more visible tradition of the English language weird - think The Twilight Zone, HP Lovecraft, Ursula Le Guin. The other is something approaching a harder-to-pin down genuinely French Weird moment. This is maybe something that might very well have its roots in the French nineteenth century, or possibly before, but which continues to inspire, stimulate and speak to the counterculture worldwide. There will undoubtedly be other paths that emerge, too and I look forward to exploring these with you. At the heart of all of this, French Weird seems to want to sketch some kind of argument about France’s relationship with the English speaking world at the same time as telling us something fleeting about French national identity, politics and culture, in 2022. Lest we forget this is, as Covid-19 becomes a long-term reality and the implications of Brexit begin to sink in, the year of a French presidential election. As we go to the urns, the debate is already dominated by the extreme right; indeed French Weirdness, and being globally weird, has never been so politically urgent.
In terms of immediate inspiration, I can point to three books on the bookshelf to the left of my desk: Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019), Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2016) and Gary Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind (2001). I’ll come back to all of these books, and all of these writers in the future. I lost myself in all of these books, but came up feeling a little frustrated: what about France in all of this? Hence, French Weird.
I also appreciate Davis, the much-missed Fisher and Lachman’s perspective - all of them are foremost writers and thinkers rather than conventional university professors. This, then, is not an academic newsletter. There will be moments approaching more traditional scholarship, but also moments of memoir, experimentation, fiction, ritual, songs and dance. Writing a book about French Weird has to, it seems to me, to at least a little, embody some of that weirdness.
My starting point and the first piece of weird unpacking that I’d like to be starting with is a book that is overdue a rethinking and rediscover, Le Matin des magiciens by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960). Translated as The Morning of the Magicians by Rollo Meyers, this is a semi-legendary counterculture handbook, found in many a blissed-out-hippy’s back pocket in the swinging sixties. I imagine that every week or so I’ll be talking about a cultural artefact or something. I’m open to ideas, to comments, to interactions, to ideas. Feel free to comment or to drop me an email (if you don’t want me to publish your message, let me, know.
I’ve never written a Substack before, and I don’t really know what I’m doing. In putting this together, I’ve been inspired in particular by the newsletters of:
Erik Davis (I like the Davis approach, his ebullience, his erudition, his words and his openness)
George Saunders (I’m there for the Saunders voice, his optimism and his nasty humour)
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And, of course, my dear friends Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu who I’m not in contact with enough. (They do this stuff really right. My newsletter will be nothing like theirs).
As I said, I’m open to ideas about the form French Weird will take as it evolves. There will be words, yes, but (I hope) not too many. I’ve already rattled on for too long I’m interested in exploring podcasting, so please don’t be alarmed if you are invited to listen to my real live voice at some point in the future. I like the idea of live streaming, too, but that might just be too weird. It’s probably inevitable, though, that if this becomes really good weird, that I’ll have to start talking about subscriptions at some point. But let’s just enjoy things as they are for now.
Until very soon,
Russell