Mallarme and Celestial Hopscotch

Day 138 of the “What are you reading, and why?’ project and Parisians who play Celestial Hopscotch will be reading Stephane Mallarme, a hitherto unknown manuscript, because it is there! Under the dome at the Temple de Pentemont 106 rue de Grenelle 75007 Paris, some kind of numerical alchemy/performance art. Today, Saturday, June 26.

Somehow this is related to the official opening of the Shanghai World’s Fair, even though it officially opened in May. If you understand it, please explain it to me.

Mallarme is connected to Jean Verlaine as a Symbolist poet, and to Charles Baudelaire, who gave us prose poetry. Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are passionate and brutal in the film Total Eclipse, very hard to watch, but watch it I did, putting together stuff for a Literature and Film class on how writers are depicted in feature film.*

And they are linked in this Bob Dylan lyric from “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”:

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I’d compare
All those scenes to this affair
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go

I am hearing it sung by Madeleine Peyroux, though, not Bob Dylan.

And that’s all I’ve got for you today, because I am off to 1) a poetry reading and 2) a slumber party. For real!

*A favorite film about a writer that I could not get hold of for this course is Stevie, with Glenda Jackson as the poet Stevie Smith.

And I bet she would be fun at a slumber party. Stevie, not Glenda.

Waving, not drowning.