October 10, 2005
Our Grand Chasublerie
With the house repairs on automatic (the new floors have been installed and acclimating for a week before the sanding and finish sealant, and the bathroom tile guy is on for tomorrow), Alberto and I can get started on the studio. Underneath the nasty drop ceiling, there's a strange half floor/attic, which brings to mind Alfred Jarry's famous half floor Paris apartment*:
``Our Grand Chasublerie,'' as he called his half-story-high apartment, affecting Ubu's royal ``We,'' was best described by surrealist playwright Guillaume Apollinaire: ``This half-floor room was the reduction of an apartment in which its occupant was quite comfortable standing up. But being taller than he, I had to stoop. The bed was the reduction of a bed; that is to say, a mere pallet. The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floors. The furniture was the reduction of furniture -- there was only a bed. . . . On the mantel stood a large stone phallus . . . considerably larger than life size, always covered with a violet skullcap of velvet. . . .'' The statue was also, according to Jarry, ``a reduction.''
Stooping is a no-go, so this half floor has to... go.
Alberto and I are in the process of tearing it out.
Dirty, physical, sweaty work.
What else is new?
A bigger picture.
*I enjoyed and will always remember Roger Shattuck's "The Banquet Years".
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