Tag: Cité de l’Ecrit

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Montmorillon

Jardin Passion weekend

Jardin Passion

The Montmorillon season opens with the weekend of Jardin Passion: Saturday and Sunday 22/23 April. Here in one place you will find exhibitors and professionals from all fields relating to the garden: horticulturists, nurserymen, landscapers, florists, decoration, do-it-yourself, garden tools (hand-tools and mechanical), garden furniture – everything for the garden from the initial concept and design to planting and maintenance.

On the program this year: conferences, photo exhibitions, animated walks, cooking demonstrations and tasting, poultry farming (with poultry on exhibition and for sale), a working forge, visits to the municipal greenhouses (using a free shuttle running between the square Marshal Leclerc and the greenhouses), workshops for children (drawing contest, planting of bulbs, games around poultry).

The Écomusée du Montmorillonnais will present an awareness of the world of insects in the Writers’ Garden on Saturday, 22 April from 2 pm to 5 pm.

Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 April 2017
Cité de l’Écrit and Place du Maréchal Leclerc from 9 am to 7 pm

Direct sales – Free admission

Information on +33 (0) 5 49 91 69 01

 

 

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Deaths

Died on this day – 30 March 2005

RobertCreeley
Photo credit: Chris Felver

The American poet Robert Creeley was born on 21 May 1926. He was author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school’s. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn.

In his later years he was an advocate of, and a mentor to, many younger poets, as well as to others outside of the poetry world. He went to great lengths to be supportive to many people regardless of any poetic affiliation. Being responsive appeared to be essential to his personal ethics, and he seemed to take this responsibility extremely seriously, in both his life and his craft. In his later years, when he became well-known, he would go to lengths to make strangers, who approached him as a well-known author, feel comfortable. In his last years, he used the Internet to keep in touch with many younger poets and friends.

Despite suffering the onset of pneumonia in 2005 Creeley made a trip to Europe and paid a visit to Montmorillon. He expressed enthusiasm for the concept of the Cité de l’Ecrit and was impressed by the range of books by American poets available at The Glass Key. Staying at the Hotel de France Robert Creeley died at sunrise on 30 March 30 2005 of complications from preumonia. He is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 10 March 1940

Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was born on 15 May 1891. He was a Russian writer, physician and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita which has been called one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

The Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov began writing in 1928 and which was finally published by his widow in 1966, twenty-six years after his death, led to an international appreciation of his work. A destroyed manuscript of the Master is an important element of the plot. Bulgakov had to rewrite the novel from memory after he burned the draft manuscript.

The novel begins with Satan visiting Moscow in the 1930s, joining a conversation between a critic and a poet debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It develops into an all-embracing indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Soviet Russia. Published more than 25 years after Bulgakov’s death, and more than ten years after Stalin’s, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov’s place among the pantheon of great Russian writers.

In March 1940 Bulgakov visited the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon and was pleased to find advance copies of his masterpiece on display in the Glass Key bookshop – 26 years in advance of its publication in Russia. So surprised by this was he that the nephroscelerosis that had killed his father finally caught up with him and he too died there and then in the bookshop.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 25 February 1983

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Orlando Fernandez, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection

 

Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III, born on 26 March 1911, was an American playwright. Along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th-century American drama.

After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944), closely reflecting his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). His later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Long Day’s Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams’ most acclaimed work was adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs.

On a trip to Europe in 1983 Williams visited Montmorillon where, after a visit to the Glass Key bookshop, he retired to the Trappe au Livres bar and launched into a serious bout of drinking before retiring to his room in the Hotel de France. It was here in his bed that he was found dead the next morning having choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of a nasal spray dispenser.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 15 February 1869

Ghalib, born Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan on 27 December 1797, was the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian-language poet during the last years of the Mughal Empire. He used the penname Ghalib which means dominant or most excellent. During his lifetime the Mughals were eclipsed and displaced by the British and finally deposed following the defeat of Indian Rebellion of 1857, events that he described.

Most notably, he wrote several ghazals during his life, which have since been interpreted and sung in many different ways by different people. Ghalib, the last great poet of the Mughal Era, is considered to be one of the most popular and influential poets of the Urdu language. Today Ghalib remains popular not only in India and Pakistan but also among the Hindustani diaspora around the world.

The ghazal is a poetic form with rhyming couplets and a refrain, each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient, originating in Arabic poetry in Arabia long before the birth of Islam. The structural requirements of the ghazal are similar in stringency to those of the Petrarchan sonnet. In style and content, it is a genre that has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation.

Whilst on a brief trip to Europe in 1869 Ghalib visited the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon, a cultural centre whose importance was rapidly increasing. Whilst perusing the remarkably broad range of poetry titles on display in The Glass Key bookshop Ghalib died happy in the knowledge that his poetic fame had spread as far as Montmorillon.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 19 September 1985

italo-calvino

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). In the fermenting atmosphere that evolved into 1968’s cultural revolution he moved with his family to Paris in 1967, setting up home in a villa in the Square de Châtillon. Nicknamed L’ironique amusé, he was invited by Raymond Queneau in 1968 to join the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group of experimental writers where he met Roland Barthes, Georges Perec and Claude Lévi-Strauss all of whom influenced his later production.

Working on a sequel to If on a winter’s night to be entitled If on a winter’s night a traveler be benighted in Montmorillon Calvino was admiring the broad range of Oulipo titles in The Glass Key Bookshop in the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 3 June 1927

Kafka1906_cropped.jpg

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on 3 July 1883. He was a philosopher and writer of novels and short stories (all written in the German language) who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20thcentury literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt and absurdity. His best known works include The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing.

Suffering from laryngeal tuberculosis Kafka came to Montmorillon at the end of May 1927. Visiting the Glass Key bookshop in the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon he became unable to breathe and he died there on 3 June. His body was returned to Prague where it was buried.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 6 June 1832

Jeremy_Bentham_by_Henry_William_Pickersgill_detailJeremy Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in London. He was a British philosopher, jurist and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law and a political radical. He advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known in recent years as an early advocate of animal rights.

In May 1832, aged 84, Bentham undertook a trip to France to follow up some research in Poitiers. Taking a day off from his labours and being passionate about the printed word he visited the Cite de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon. It was 6 June and Bentham died suddenly whilst gazing at the splendid display of books shown in the window of The Glass Key bookshop.

His body was returned to England because he had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.
After dissection the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Southwood Smith it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as “present but not voting”.

Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. However, Southwood Smith’s experimental efforts at mummification although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. The Auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham’s own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.

Jeremy_Bentham_Auto-Icon

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Books

Stephen King wins best novel Edgar

MrmercedesMaster of horror Stephen King has won America’s top crime-writing award for his serial killer thriller Mr Mercedes. The novel, in which a retired cop is taunted by the perpetrator of a massacre he never managed to solve, sees King steer clear of paranormal elements to focus on a very human evil.

The other five titles shortlisted for the best novel award were: Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin (part of his series of crime novels about the detective John Rebus); Coptown by Karin Slaughter; This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash; Wolf by Mo Hayder and The Final Silence by Stuart Neville.

Run by the Mystery Writers of America, the Edgars, named for Edgar Allan Poe, have been running for over 60 years, with the best novel prize won in the past by Patricia Highsmith, John le Carré and Raymond Chandler.

The best first novel by an American author award went to Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman, in which a corpse is discovered on the property of an elderly man in Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania.

The ceremony also saw James Ellroy and Lois Duncan named grand masters, an honour the Mystery Writers of America says represents “the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing”.

It is just a pity that, as far as I know, Stephen King has no plans of visiting The Glass Key bookshop in the Cite de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon.  It is just possible that he has heard of the extraordinary number of famous people who have died here.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 29 April 1776

Edward_Wortley_Montagu_by_Matthew_William_Peters

Edward Wortley Montagu, born on 15 May 1713, was an English author and traveller. He was the son of Edward Wortley Montagu, MP and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose talent and eccentricity he seems to have inherited.

He was the first native of the United Kingdom to be vaccinated against smallpox. He served in the British army from 1743-1748, first as a cornet in the 7th Dragoon Guards and later as a captain-lieutenant in the 1st Regiment of Foot. He fought at the Battle of Fontenoy but left the army in 1748.
He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdonshire in 1747, and was one of the secretaries at the conference of Aix-la-Chapelle that closed the War of Austrian Succession. In 1751 he was involved in a disreputable gaming quarrel in Paris. He continued to sit in parliament, and wrote Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republics … (1759). His father left him an annuity of £1000, the bulk of the property going to Lady Bute, the author’s sister,

He set out for extended travel in the East, and George Romney describes him as living in the Turkish manner at Venice (the Turkish manner included adopting a Nubian paramour). He had great gifts as a linguist, and was an excellent talker. His family thought him mad, and his mother left him a single guinea in her will, but her annuity devolved on him at her death.

Travelling in France in 1776 he visited Montmorillon. Walking in the Cite de l’Ecrit Edward Wortley Montagu was barred from entering The Glass Key bookshop because he was eating a bag of fish-and-chips. Standing in the rue de la Poelerie outside the shop he choked on a fish bone and died on 29 April 1776.