As days get shorter and I seem to grow more tired of literary discourse, which in this grey island with a fuel crisis amounts basically to people agreeing politely over a series of safe talking points, may I summon the words of Louis Aragon on literary critics, while I live in hope of some good literary beef to come.
I shall have passed through this world with a few people all graced with a quality of absolute purity, that same purity you may have had the fortune to glimpse in the sky one summer evening (André Breton, for example) scorned, insulted, spat upon. But if one day my words become sacred — they are already — then let my laughter echo back from far away. My words will never serve your miserable ends, you who thought to sneer at us, filthy creatures. And when I say journalist I always mean scum. To hell with you at L’Intran, Comædia, L’Oeuvre, Les Novelles Littéraires, etc, morons, creeps, bastards, swine. All of you, without exception: glabrous bugs, bearded lice, burrowing your way into reviews, into dubious publications of all sorts, you’ll get what’s coming to you in the end. It all stinks. Ink. Squashed cockroach. Shit. Death to all of you who live off the lives of others, off their loves, their boredoms. Death to those whose hand is pierced by a pen, death to those who paraphrase what I say.”
From Paris Peasant, translated from the French by Simon Watson-Taylor.
“ bearded lice” 👌