Weird Christmas Videos

Stumbled upon a couple of weird Christmas movies created by the guy who translated "Arsole Fantüme, Gentleman Immoralist" earlier this year. They feature a character called Stumpy Claus, a limbless figure of horror and menace who is kind of a cross between Santa Claus and Krampus-- he punishes bad kids so that they can receive their gifts, and he rewards good kids with-- well, he rewards good kids. He also has a mysterious man in a reindeer suit called Reindeer, and a chain-smoking elf who speaks in word balloons that pop out of her mouth and float away.

They are weird:





Image of Krampus:



From here.

Image of Santa:



From here.

Review: "Arsole Fantüme, Gentleman Immoralist"

"Arsole Fantüme, Gentleman Immoralist" is one of those novels that you think just can't exist. It's hardly known outside of a very small coterie of hardcore fans of French, obscure, bizarro, and horror fiction. Even those who've heard of it have trouble believing in it.

The title character is an irredeemable criminal who murders people by enema. And that might be the least strange thing about it.

There's also the psychiatrists, most notably the veil-wearing and poodle-carrying Dr. Termite, who uses therapeutic speech to hypnotize people into doing his bidding.

There's the police force, which consists of a few men dedicated to- well, eating strange French cuisine and having affairs with prostitutes. Some crimes are actually so disturbing that they consider it ungentlemanly to investigate them.

There's the zombies. An occult group called "The Lunar 13" is able to recapture the souls of some dead (men, whose corpses haven't been too badly mangled in whatever incident caused their death) and reanimated the corpses through a combination of Latin chanting and menstrual fluid.

There's the spirits. A giant human with a partial bird-head called Notta Thot is summoned by The Lunar 13 to do their bidding. He is able to discarnate himself, and lives half in the human dimension and half in a place called "Otherwhere."

There's "The Main Office," apparently a national police force, one of the members of which, Inspector Lefévre, has been charged with capturing Arsole, at any price.

There is the social commentary and satire of city life at the turn of the 20th century. It's a brutal world where the haves live worry-free, while the have-nots scrounge for every morsel they can find, even if it's just waste.

My own first brush with the novel was purely subliminal, as I've already mentioned on this blog. My discovery of Edward Gorey's drawing of a veil-wearing, poodle-carrying man wearing a large fur coat, first published in Life magazine many years ago. That image of Dr. Termite haunted me. It wasn't until years after seeing that image that I realized that Dr. Termite was one of the main characters in "Arsole Fantüme, Gentleman Immoralist."

Of course, I had to read the book. Unfortunately, it was not in print even in its native France. Largely forgotten, unfortunately obscure.

Now, however, it's been translated by someone called Ricky Sprague. His introduction details the reasons for the book's obscurity, and the unfortunate circumstances that befell the book after its publication. There's also some self-serving bits about his own relationship to the book.

Please. He's the translator. Who cares about how he came to discover the book? We want information on Arsole, and on his creators, Marcel Maurice and Pierre.

(In fairness to Sprague, it appears there is very little information available on these two men.)

The book begins with Arsole claiming yet another victim, and leaving him lying in a "chunky pool of his own intestinal effluvia." The victim, it turns out, is a thief called Jacques Purg, who was searching for something called "The Coer de Merde" diamond.

(By the way, "Coer de Merde" is not a misprint. In the original French publication, which I have been able to see for myself, it is spelled "Coer," not "Coeur." The joke is that it's Latin, not French, and refers not to a heart, but to force or coercion. Sprague's translation could have made this more clear- especially late in the novel when the "Coer de Merde" is discovered. Notes might have been helpful on this point, and on the fact that Sprague translated the printer's errors from the original novel. The effect is as close as the modern English reader can get to reading the original work, but why not explicitly tell us this? Is Sprague just trying to be modest?)

We learn that the Coer de Merde might or might not have been owned by someone named Mme Possédant. She, too, has been murdered by enema, and her body is discovered by her own daughter, Germaine. The sight of her dead mother sends her into shock, and, unable to speak, she is sent by her uncle Guillaume to live in a mental hospital called The Wierd Institute.

The Wierd Institute is currently run by its interim director, Dr. Bouchard, who is awaiting a permanent director, who has been appointed by The Association. The previous director, Dr. Blanc, has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and Dr. Bouchard is jealous of the fact that another doctor has been appointed to take his place.

The day of Germaine's interment in the hospital, a conductor called Chaput also comes to stay. He will be living on the mental hospital's penthouse level, which is actually run as a luxury hotel. He's there to rest, and to attempt to write music, but he offers to tutor Germaine during her stay.

Meanwhile, the policeman investigating the crimes against Jacques and Mme Possédant has discovered that his own partner is yet a third victim of Arsole. Inspector Vargasse finds his partner's body beside Jacques's. Although he's certain that Arsole is the man responsible, very few other members of the force believe him. They think Arsole is a myth.

They continue to believe he's a myth even after a man from the Main Office, Inspector Lefévre, enters the picture. He has been tracking Arsole's movements for years, and believes that these latest crimes have been committed by him. So he and Vargasse canvas the city (which is called simply "The City"), looking for clues.

Inspector Vargasse's wife, Esmerald, is a member of the aforementioned Lunar 13, along with Dr. Bouchard, a vampire, and several others. They spend their time reanimating corpses, engaging in cult sex, and calling upon the whimsical spirit Notta Thot, who is forced to do their bidding.

The new head of The Wierd Institute arrives under a mysterious cloud. Guillaume Possédant is an importer, and his boat has just returned from a long and perilous voyage, on which all the food ran out and crewmembers were forced to eat one anothers' body parts. Dr. Termite, who was apparently a passenger on the boat, seems completely unaffected. The same can be said for his poodle, Perdita, who is his constant companion.

All of this is merely the set-up. The dense novel is full of bizarre twists and turns that keep the reader guessing as to where it's all headed (all of the threads connect quite satisfactorily in one explosive climax), and just who all of these people really are. One of them is Arsole Fantüme. Some of them are lying about their true motives. All of them have secrets.

For instance, what is "Ultra Veal," and what is its signifigance? We know it's a dish that is so succulent that someone might be willing to murder for it, but who, and why? What happened to Dr. Blanc? What is the Coer de Merde? What is the signifigance of Esmerald Vargasse's menstrual cycles? All of these questions and more are addressed in what is strange and arresting read.

As for Arsole's crimes, they are as gruesome and wanton as you'd expect. One victim is made to be part of a grotesque art installation, another's body is "booby trapped" with acid, another is chopped into pieces and used to enemate yet another victim- and they escalate even from there. The absurdity of the crimes becomes almost farcical- indeed there is a great deal of black humor in the novel as well.

The English translation can be purchased from amazon here, and is highly recommended.

The Time-Traveler's Wife: A Bad Book, a Worse Film.

The novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife” was released in 2003 and became a bestseller and got a lot of really glowing reviews (I couldn’t find any negative reviews of the novel when I googled it).

It was terrible, pure and total shite- a middle aged woman’s wet dream, with a little bit of kiddie porn wish fulfillment thrown in for the dirty old men. It is, in other words, a "two-quadrant" book.

When my girlfriend, Kelly, told me she wanted to see the film version last night, I told her that I'd already read the book, back when I was reading bestsellers (I was trying to write one of my own), and that the book was terrible, pure and total shite. I then proceeded to explain to her why I felt this way.

Basically, it’s about a dirty old man with a ridiculous and illogical condition that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. At 41, he starts meeting a 6 year old girl in the meadow outside her home in Michigan. She brings him clothes because he’s naked when he travels through time. Anyway, he knows that in the future when he’s 30 and she’s 22 they’re going to meet, fall in love, and get married. So he starts manipulating her into becoming his perfect woman. I won’t bore you with all the details (which are all boring), but basically when he’s something like 42 and it’s her 18th birthday he pops her cherry and tells her that they’ll meet again in the future, in Chicago, but he won’t tell her anything else because he doesn’t want to spoil it and it’s already happened anyway so there’s nothing they can do about it. So she saves herself for him, since they were meant to be together (he is the perfect guy after all, since he waited until her 18th birthday to screw her – how romantic!) and so fi

nally she meets him when she’s 22 and he’s 30, she pushes herself on him, they fall in love, etc. As an "earnest" love story, it makes absolutely no sense. I mean seriously, if a man had written this do you think the reviews would have been as positive as they were?

It’s despicable.

I kept reading it because I was thinking, “She’s got to do something to turn this around, like it’s all in this character’s head, or she’s going to somehow subtly point out how this girl is being abused by this time-traveling man” but NO, she doesn’t do that at all. She’s serious! And it’s incredibly badly written. Supposedly it’s narrated by the two main protagonists at different points in their lives, but the 6 year old Clare talks exactly like the 36 year old Henry. She has a cheat to tell you who’s talking, otherwise you wouldn’t know.

[BOOK SPOILER ALERT]

Oh, and the way Henry dies is ludicrous - he gets fros

tbite, and his feet are amputated! If you were an involuntary time traveler and you popped around naked in the middle of winter, wouldn't you move somewhere sunnier than Chicago?

[END BOOK SPOILER ALERT]

And it’s full of the author’s snobby opinions on Punk Rock, Heidegger, Van Gogh, and most especially Rainier Maria Rilke. And she uses the Stephen Mitchell translation when quoting him! There’s nothing worse than a snob with bad taste. Oh, and the non-white characters (servants and landlords) are treated condescendingly.

Anyway, Kelly was unmoved by criticisms of the book, and insisted she wanted to see something romantic, "a good, old-fashioned chick flick" for a Friday night.

The movie was somehow worse than the

book, even though it only took a couple of hours to get through. They basically maintained the spirit of the book, which of course was too bad, and only slightly altered the ending.

[MOVIE SPOILER ALERT]

In the movie, it's a hunting accident that does in the time-traveler. He's mistaken for a deer. This makes slightly more sense, I guess, but even still- he could have yelled out "I'm a human, don't shoot!" or something. And, he could have moved to Florida, or Texas, or Arizona, or New Mexico, or California. Some place where, if he's time-traveling without clothes, he wouldn't get too cold.

[END MOVIE SPOILER ALERT]

After the movie, Kelly apologized for forcing me to sit through it, and said she owed me one. She'd go see any movie I wanted, without complaining. I pointed out that, while I did sit through the movie with her, I also complained- not during the movie. Somehow, I managed to keep my mouth closed about how shamelessly manipulative the whole enterprise was. But before, as I've already related in this blog post.

"That's true," she said. Then she told me she would go with me to see any movie I wanted, would complain about it, then sit quietly in the theater and sulk.

I told her that I was happy to have met her when I did, because she was perfect. And I didn't even have to meet her when she was a little girl and "raise her" to be my perfect mate. She just grew up that way.

Edward Gorey's picture of Dr. Termite and Perdita from "Arsole Fantüme"

My mother had lots of old magazines laying around when I was growing up. One of them was called "Look," and some time in the late 1960s they published some drawings by the great cartoonist, Edward Gorey. One of them was the drawing you see to the left.

All the Gorey drawings intrigued me, but this one probably most of all. I was haunted by the mysterious "Dr. T." What was he a doctor of? What did the "T" stand for? Why did he always carry a poodle with him? And, why was he wearing what appeared to be a mask?

I thought "Dr. T" was just a figment of Edward Gorey's strange imagination. It wasn't until years later, and quite by accident, I happened to be reading a book on obscure French horror that I came upon a passage about the novel "Arsole Fantüme, Gentleman Immoralist," that described one of the characters as a veil-wearing psychiatrist who never went anywhere without his faithful poodle, Perdita.

A bell went off in my head, as I recalled the Gorey drawing that had so unsettled me as a child. If, in fact, I'd ever really forgotten it.

I've been reading the new English translation of the Arsole Fantüme book (which can be ordered from amazon here), and I'll have some thoughts ready soon, I think. The book itself is strange, exciting, scary, and hilarious. But I'll need a few more days to get my thoughts into some kind of order.

Quick Note: Looking For Information

I'm looking for any information on the creators of the "Arsole Fantüme" novels, a pair of writers who used the names "Marcel Maurice" and "Pierre." I know a new translation of "AF" has been recently published, but other than that, my research has dead-ended.

This is just a quick note to get myself and my request out there. I'm an author and very much interested in writing an article or perhaps something longer on these obscure writers' lives.