(Electronic & Others) High or Middle Culture?

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A/Z's post on Instagram: sound & video in the background: The Knife's Silent Shout (from Disk III of Silent Shout's Deluxe Edition);

A Rough Sketch of Tommy Cash, drawing by A/Z available with other drawings and photographs at Fine Art America; 

The Knife (Networking);

The Knife (Tomorrow in a Year); 

Björk (Mouth's Cradle);

Björk (Pluto);

Madonna (Material Girl);

Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi's Dead);

DAF (Der Räuber un der Prinz);

DAF (El Que);

Japan (Ghosts);

Orange Juice (Rip It Up);

Public Image Limited (Albatross);

Chrome (All Data Lost);

Factrix (Phantom Play);

The Residents (Swastikas on Parade);

This Heat (A New Kind of Water);

The Flying Lizards (Money);

Wire (I'm the Fly);

Talking Heads (Psycho Killer);

DNA (Detached);

Mars (Helen Forsdale);

Teenage Jesus (Orphans);

Contortions (I Can't Stand Myself);

Throbbing Gristle (Greasy Spoon);

Cabaret Voltaire (Silent Command, Kino);

The Future (Future Religion);

The Pop Group (We Are Time);

Devo (The Truth About De-Evolution) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];

Donna Summer (I Feel Love); 

Blue Jay Way (Beatles); 

Cambridge 1969 (John Lennon & Yoko Ono); 

The Crucifixion (Phil Ochs); 

Ornette Coleman's Sound Museum (montage A/Z);

Bat Macumba (Mutantes);

Saúde (Rita Lee) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];

On the Rocks (Rita Lee);

Morton Subotnick (Silver apples of the Moon); 

Alack Karis & Kian Freitas/ Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra; 

Milda Vitartaite plays Mario Davidovsky Synchronisms N 6 (for piano and electronic sound, Youtube);

Code Morel & One Hundred Forty Nine Inches (montage A/Z) [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

"In one of its innumerable forms music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant and partly narcotic, but wholly alterative."

A. Huxley, The Devils of Loudun

"After we'd sniff glue we used to call up number on the phone. We knew these numbers to dial where you could get these weird sounds. We'd call the numbers and it would go Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep."

Dee Dee Ramone (Please Kill Me)
"... remettre en usage des instruments anciens et oubliés, créer des instruments nouveaux... rechercher,  en dehors de la musique, des instruments et des appareils qui, basés sur des fusions spéciales ou des alliages renouvelés de métaux, puissent atteindre un diapason nouveau de l'octave, produire des sons ou des bruits insupportables, lancinants."
A. Artaud (Le théâtre de la cruauté)

"Zuletzt fehlt mir jeder Grund, die Hoffnung auf eine dionysische Zukunftder Musik zurückzunehmen."

"... wie der das Schwerste von Schicksal, ein Verhängniss von Aufgabe tragende Geist trotzdem der leichteste und jenseitigste sein kann — Zarathustra ist ein Tänzer —;" 

Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)

"... long live dancing in the eddy of the infinite!" 

The young person in Repetition (translation by M. G. Piety)

"... une des divinités caractéristiques du Panthéon brahmanique est le Danseur Suprême. Etre universel, il détient le fil du labyrinthe cosmique. Seigneur jouant au degré le plus élevé: son passe-temps est, inextricablement, de créer et d'anéantir."

André Masson (La tentation de l'Orient/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Você acredita que eu ia pro Dancing Days dançar a noite inteira, sozinho?"
Ney Matogrosso

"When the mood came over him, he might suddenly interrupt a Saturday afternoon walk in the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse by flinging his loose limbs about in a kind of spider dance, the effect accentuated by his tight trouser-legs and wide cloak, diminutive hat, and thin cane."
Richard Ellmann
"Voisin d'un dancing for populaire connu plus tard sous le nom de Bal nègre, un vieille maison marquée pour la pioche... De l'autre côté: deux ateliers d'artistes... Cette campagnonnage n'avait rien de typiquement 'intellectuel'; parler et sentir ensemble, prendre ses repas en commun, travailler d'une même élan, et danser."
André Masson (45, rue Blomet/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Na gravação de Adeus Maria Fulô, usei um instrumentinho que os palhaços Torresmo e Fuzarca faziam com tampinhas de garrafa afinadas que, ao soltá-las no chão, tilintavam a nota certa... regravamos Bat Macumba e Baby..."
"Éramos apreciados por nossa esquisitice visual e sonora."
"Quando lançamos Saúde, a crítica me crucificou porque pela primeira vez no país usei em algumas faixas a bateria eletrônica Korg. Diziam que eu havia tirado o trabalho de bateristas humanos. Enquanto a crítica vinha com a farinha, minha antena futurista já comia o bolo. Ser pioneira tem seu preço."
"Minha preferida dessa safra é On the rocks, trenzão, pesadão e chique, letra bem colocada, instrumentália precisa, mixagem perfeita, uma de que muito me orgulho."
Rita Lee

"Com sua trupe panfamiliar, suas mulheres e filhos músicos (virtuoses de vanguarda e jazzistas-roqueiros), Stockhausen é o elo perdido entre a grande música e uma outra música que poderá surgir."
José Miguel Wisnik

"Je me souviens avoir discuté avec Stockhausen... l'idée selon laquelle 'notre musique' (cette notion commune existait encore un peu)... aurait pour mission... d'édifier un 'space' suffisamment étendu et complexe pour que puissent s'y rencontrer... soit l'ancien et le nouveau, soit le 'savant' et le 'populaire'..."

"... des échanges, parfois secrets, s'établissant entre les 'genres', et même certaines des acquisitions les plus aventureuses des musiques expérimentales s'acclimatant dans des régios moins 'distinguées' ou même plus commericales (qu'on pense à la subversion du langage qu'a représente le 'free jazz' ou l'assimilation de l'électronique par le pop, le rock et, surtout les musiques illustratives et 'fonctionelles')..."

Henri Pousseur, Musiques Croisées

"La pauvreté reprochée à beaucoup de sons synthétiques, et pas seulement sur les appareils 'bas gamme', provient souvent du fait que peu de paramètres varient, par exemple que seule la hauteur change, alors qu'entre une note d'un instrument acoustique et la note immédiatement plus grave ou plus aiguë, une foule de variables bougent (pente de décroissance d'intensité, timbre harmonique, vibrato...) simultanément avec la hauteur, même si c'est plus discrètement qu'elle. En même temps, c'est cette pauvreté qui fait le charme propre des sons synthétiques, et des groupes et auteurs 'pop' comme Kraftwerk ou Brian Eno."

"Alan Williams défend l'idée — que nous partageons — que 'ce n'est jamais le sont littéral, 'original' qui est reproduit dans l'enregistrement, mais une perspective sur lui."

"... le son pourrait avoir d'être 'inréifiable' tout en étant accessible à une description et une appréhension plus précises."

Michel de Chion, Le Son

"[Nos áureos tempos na Rádio Nacional] a sonoplastia era coisa de 'alto nível'... Apenas composições dos grandes mestres da música clássica é que integravam as trilhas sonoras daquele período. Mais que isso, os sonoplastas davam preferência ao repertório de vanguarda da música do século XX. Enquanto o público 'consumidor de cultura' torcia o nariz no Municipal ao ouvir as execuções dos mais avançados autores de nossa época, as donas de casa, ao fritar suas abobrinhas, estavam ouvindo no rádio, através da sonoplastia, nada menos que Stravinsky, Schöenberg, Webern, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Dukas e outros."

"No fim dos anos 60... Numa era das mais criativas da história, a molecada agarrou a tal caixinha, o sintetizador, e saiu pelo mundo ejaculando frequência por todos os poros... O Japão, o país do futuro, ativava ainda mais sua indústria eletroeletrônica produzindo centenas de maquininhas infernais, práticas e portáveis, que faziam da manipulação do som eletrônico um brinquedo infantil."

Julio Medaglia (Música Impopular)

"The 1980s were a great time for innovation with regard to electronic music. Pop music was starting to incorporate new types of keyboards and drum machines, with new ones coming out every month that helped refine and define the sound of that era."
"You would be surprised how many happy accidents make it onto the records. Robert used to call me 'the X factor,' as he was never quite sure what I might come up with."
"We also liked the way he played his leather trousers with his hands. Yes, that's what you hear on 'The Carterpillar' that sounds like butterfly wings beating: Mr. A.'s leather trousers."
"I have always had a great love for all kinds of experimental music, especially the early synthesizer pioneers like Morton Subotnick, and I loved Don Buchla's electronic machines."
Lol Tolhurst
**************************************************************

"Recorded in West Berlin, Bowie's Low and Heroes, Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life (both of which Bowie produced), hugely impacted listeners [and] signaled a shift away from America and rock'n'roll toward Europe and a cool, controlled sound in which synthesizers played as much of a role as guitars..." 

"...  1977's most significant singles [were] 'Trans-Europe Express,' a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer's Eurodisco smash 'I Feel Love,' made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, and Italian based in in Munich."
"Rather than a keyboard, Devo treated the synth as a noise generator. 'The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be,' Mothersbaugh told one interviewer. 'You can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brains waves, blood flow.'"
"Devo found Alan Myers, 'this incredible metronomic drummer,' and the group started to explore disconcertingly disjointed time signatures like 7/8 and 11/8. 'Those kind of timings make you feel rigid right away,' says Casale."
"... all rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheet of sound recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick. For a while Cabaret Voltaire didn't even have a proper synth, instead using tape loops and a primitive oscillator built by Watson. Kirk's primary instrument was the clarinet, fed through effects to sound harshly processed and eerie, as on the spychotic-bucolic Fuse Mountain."
"Initially, the Future came up with 'the rather radical idea that we'd have shared vocals,' says Ian Craig Marsh. 'We dispensed with our names and called ourselves A, B, and C. I was all very computer oriented...' A cybernetic version of Burroughs's and Gysin's cut-ups and surrealist automatic writing..."
"Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanization of Mallinder's voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being."
"COUM started as a rock band of sorts, making up music on the spot, undeterred by lack of grounding in improvisational technique, using broken violins and prepared piano as well as conventional rock instruments like drums and electric bass. Inspired by John Cage's writing and by primitivists like the Fugs and the Velvet Underground, P-Orridge believed that 'the future of music lies in nonmusicians.'"
"Ironically, a traditional blues and country technique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises."
"Byrne was reading books by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists... Eno and Byrne became fascinated with American radio's menagerie of evangelist preachers, right-wing pundits, and callers phoning in to live talk radio shows. Radio was America's seething id."
"Unwilling to spend what it would take to make Wire happen as a pop group, EMI was equally disinclined to fund their more esoteric side."
"Factrix quickly  realized that 'you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, 'let's see what happens if we do this wrong.'"
"'The mystical for Factrix was teh  same as Coltrane or any musician who's trying to get to the place where the music is free. The sounds, they really  did have a life of their own. We were really just following the sounds. We were disciples of feedback' [Bond Bergland]."
"'Most  bands get a synthesizer and their first idea is to tune it! They want a clean normal sound. They don't work with the power you get from a synthesizer. We want to bring together this high technique with body  power' [Robert Görl/DAF]."
"DAF and their offshoot group Liaisons Dangereuses influenced the embryonic black electronic sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno, while Kraftwerk almost single-handedly inspired New York electro."
"'You could do a vaguely experimental film thing as cheaply as you possibly could, and if it was connected to a song, MTV would play it because they needed stuff desperately in those days' [David Byrne]."
"Rave music teemed with futuristic textures and strange noises that came straight out of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire... Acid house essentially fused postpunk futurism with sixties Dionysian frenzy."

Simon Reynolds

"As Stockhausen showed in the 1950s, electronic instruments unify the time field between the audio or intoned frequencies above about 20 Hz and the infrasonic or rhythmic frequencies below this threshold. This means that we can compose throughout this zone, where rhythms morph into tones and vice versa."

"A sine [in a simple sinusoidal wave] repeats at exactly constant intervals of time. Repeating waveforms are called periodic. If there is no discernible repetition pattern, it is called aperiodic or noise. In between the extremes of periodic and aperiodic is a vast domain of quasi-periodic tones. The rate of repetition of a periodic sound is called its fundamental frequency, measured in cycles per second."

"Many frequencies can superimpose in a waveform. A frequency-domain or spectrum representation shows the distribution of frequency energy in a sound... A working definition of spectrum is: a measure of the distribution of signal energy as a function of frequency. Such a definition may seem straightforward, but in practice, different analysis techniques measure properties that they each call 'spectrum' with diverging results. Except for isolated test cases, the practice of spectrum analysis is not an exact science."

"Myriad alternatives to Fourier-based spectrum estimation exist (Roads 1996). Among them, one family is of particular interest, as they decompose a sound into a collection of sound atoms (analogous to grains)."

"... the ear is especially sensitive to frequencies between 1000 Hz and 4000 Hz. Tones in this region sound louder than tones of equal intensity in other frequencies. Thus the measurement of loudness falls under the realm of psychoacoustics."

"The subject of masking inevitably arises in discussions of loudness perception. In its most basic form, masking describes a phenomenon wherein a low-level sound is obscured by a higher-level sound. For example, standing in a shower masks many sounds, such as someone speaking nearby."

"... other types of masking effects are time-based: forward and backward masking. Consider a short sound that ends abruptly. The human auditory system continues to react for a short time (about a half second) after the sound ends. This 'resonance' can blur our perception of the onset of a second sound. Indeed, when the time interval between impulses is less than about 50 ms, the ear no longer perceives them as separate impulses... Backward masking is a curious phenomenon. Basically, a loud click or noise coming less than 100 ms after another sound can obscure our perception of the earlier sound. The masking sound can disrupt the brain’s ability to hear a preceding sound, hence the term backward). It is interesting that both forward masking and backward masking occur in the visual domain as well."

"Low-frequency impulsive events are perceived as rhythms. These are the infrasonic frequencies in the range below about 20 Hz. The infectious beating rhythms of percussion instruments fall within this range."

"Structure-borne sound is vibration that one can feel, like the vibration caused by a train rumbling down nearby tracks. These are typically low-frequency vibrations that one’s ear may be able to hear, but they are also felt through the body. Of course, we can also feel high frequencies, such as the buzzing of an electric razor, which is felt by the hand, as well as heard by the ear."

"Ultrasound comprises the domain of high frequencies beyond the range of human audibility."

"Sound propagates at different rates, depending on the medium of propagation... Sounds at extreme sonic velocities are destructive. Explosives can generate powerful transonic shock wave air currents traveling at up to 8000 meters per second, corresponding to Mach 24. These destroy everything in their path."

"Sounds have a specific physical size as well as shape. A quiet sound is physically petite. One has to put one’s ear close to it because the body of air it perturbs is tiny. Other sound waves are gigantic, such as the Krakatoa explosion of August 1883. It was heard 4800 kilometers away, and the pressure wave traveled around the earth for 127 hours."

"When rhythms are sped up, they morph into tones. When modulations like tremolo and vibrato are sped up, they morph into complex spectra. Streaming around the thresholds of this zone of morphosis—where discrete events turn into continuous tones—is intrinsically fascinating."

"... as [Paul] Griffiths observed, electronic music can resolve an antagonism between music and text since words themselves can be transformed. Extreme distortions obscure the meanings of the words, so that the sonic contours of the vocalisms are more important than their literal sense. Moreover, the freedom of the electronic medium encourages composers to make smooth connections between vocal and non-vocal material."

"In the ideal, a source of noise should generate random values. To define an algorithm for generating truly random numbers is, however, impossible mathematically (Chaitin). Any software method for random number generation ultimately rests on a finite, deterministic procedure. Hence, an algorithm for generating 'random' numbers is actually a pseudorandom number generator... Stephen Wolfram famously developed a new type of pseudorandom number generator that he called rule 30 based on a cellular automata algorithm that is much more random than previous algorithms. A main challenge for digital synthesis is creating more sophisticated algorithmic models for noise... Natural wind, sea spray, waterfalls, and thunder are excellent sources of wideband noise. Speech and animal sounds contain many evocative noises, especially the fricatives and plosives of speech [s], [z], [sh], [f], [k], [t], [p], [g], and so on. I have already mentioned the rich noises of the unpitched percussion instruments. Collections of samples recorded at industrial sites are available. These feature the sounds of crushing, creaking, scraping, squealing, squeaking, and grinding... Analog devices produce some of the most complex and unstable noises. For example, the noise from a diode section of a transistor is widely considered to be one of the most random phenomena in nature... The ear is attracted to changes in noise, to trends... As early drum machines taught us, white noise is a poor substitute for a cymbal crash."

"The early electronic music of Stockhausen is a classic example of the integration of pitched and non-pitched elements. Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) juxtaposed sung serial melodies and chords against such elements as 'sine complex showers,' 'impulse complex showers,' filtered and broadband noise, and 'chords' of narrow noise bands. His Kontakte (1960) takes the contrasts even further. At any given instant, Stockhausen pits noise against pitch, fixed against moving, close against far, short against long, high against low register, soft against loud—always in sharp relief. This unrelenting counterpoint of contrasts marks Kontakte as an especially inventive composition, as Stockhausen discovered oppositions that were never before articulated."

"The lush spatial effect of artificial reverberation is characteristic of the electronic medium. Early recordings used a real physical space—an echo chamber—to produce reverberation."

"Spring reverberators in electric organs date to the 1940s and were later common in guitar amplifiers. In the 1950s, Elektro-Mess-Technik (EMT) introduced the massive (2.4 meters long, 200 kg) model 140 plate reverberator, a higher-quality reverberator renowned for its concert hall-like sound. Plate reverberators consist of a large, thin piece of sheet metal suspended from a steel frame by springs... Equipped with vacuum tube electronics, these units were installed in early electronic music studios like the historic WDR studio in Cologne, where Stockhausen realized many of his electronic pieces, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio... The classic EMT 140 impulse response is accurately modeled by contemporary software reverberators and still marries well with electronic sonorities."

"Portable field recorders enable composers to integrate natural spatial environments (both interior and exterior) into their work. Interior recordings bring us into living spaces, while recording the open space of the outdoors environment allows us to enter the realm of free field acoustics, characterized by a total lack of reflections. Of course, there can also be reflections outside, but the distance cue becomes especially important as we hear the natural foreground/background of the soundstage... Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930) pioneered this genre, depicting the urban soundscape of Berlin. Two decades later, musique concrète used natural sounds, but typically in short clips spliced together rapidly. In contrast, Luc Ferrari’s breakthrough composition Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–1970) began as a long, continuous recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach."

"Sound spatialization presents two facets: the virtual and the physical. In the studio, composers spatialize sounds by means of tape echo feedback, delays, spectral filtration, phase shift (for image displacement, widening, and narrowing), convolution, granulation, panning, Doppler shift (for simulation of moving sounds), and reverberation. These transformations give the illusion of sounds inhabiting and moving in imaginary virtual environments."

"Tape echo feedback (TEF) is a classic tape-studio approach to sound transformation that creates a ping-pong panning echo effect, but it can also lead to a transmutation as the original input sound is submerged in distant feedback. There are many variations on TEF, but the classic version requires an analog tape recorder with a continuously variable speed control."

"Another class of reverberators based on convolution is especially interesting... we can take the acoustic signature of an existing space such as a concert hall, and through convolution, impose its spatial characteristics on any sound, creating the illusion of sounds playing in the portrayed space... In the theory of convolution, the acoustic signature of a physical space is sampled by recording the response of a room to a sharp impulse. This is its impulse response."

"Since convolution itself is straightforward, the added value of convolving reverberator applications comes in the form of extensive libraries of proprietary IRs of exotic spaces, including concert halls, cathedrals, stadiums, theaters, churches, recording studios, rooms, scoring stages, clubs, tombs, car interiors, closets, and even acoustic instruments... it is also possible to create synthetic IRs that model strange imaginary rooms with otherworldly echo patterns."

"Starting from the edge of the conventional loudspeaker, we can treat dif- ferent sounds so that they appear to emanate from specific depths behind the loudspeaker. This leads to one of the more interesting possibilities in electronic music: the possibility of a counterpoint between foreground and background elements, where the perceived depth of each element is a function of its virtual acoustic properties. A low-pass filtered sound—bathed in reverberation and diminished in amplitude—recedes into the background, while a bright, present, loud sound jumps to the foreground."

Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music

See also:

- liste des déclencheurs;

- Kur-d-t My Ghost;

- God Save the Queen;

- Darkwaves beyond the 80's;

- Call me Helium;

- Elements of Musical Language;

- Piano Playing;

And also: 

- Kitsch, Neokitsch, Antikitsch; 

- Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs & Ney Matogrosso;

- Audrey Hempburnt Haunted by A/Z;

- Genug! Manifesto;

- Favorite quotes from Detlev Claussen's Theodor W. Adorno;

- Umberto Eco about Nietzsche (& deconstruction); - Warszawa;

- movies about musicians;

- Série, presque à genoux with thread; 

- Brazil in the 80's;

- Tropicalismo; 

***"Who May Speak? From a Politics of Popular Music to a Popular Politics of Music" (by Richard Middleton); 

***"The Politics of Passion: The Impact of Bolero on Brazilian Musical Expressions" (Samuel Araújo); 

***"Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla" (Victoria Malawey, MTO);

***"An introduction to the poetics of sacred sound in twentieth-century music" (Luigi Irlandini, Revista Vórtex);

***"Sound-Generation by Means of a Digital Computer" (James C. Tenney, Journal of Music Theory, 1963);

***"Pulse as Dynamic Attending: Analysing Beat Bin Metre in Neo Soul Grooves" (Anne Danielsen, 2018); 

***"Time and Meter in Mande Drumming from Mali" (Rainer Polak & Justin London, MTO, 2014);

***"Waltz" (Paolo Prato, Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, 2017); 

***"The Polka Before and After the Polka" (Egil Bakka, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 2001);

Rimbaud (Correspondance + Pierre Petitfils)

"Quartier Latin", photography by A/Z available with other photographs and drawings at Fine Art America; 

"Jusqu’à quel point faut-il prendre ces jeremiads au sérieux, puisqu’il nous met lui-même en garde contre elles? « Si je me plains, écrit-il le 10 juillet 1882, c’est une espèce de façon de chanter . » ([preface de Jean Voellmy]: 9).

"...je vois avec le plus grand plaisir que derrière votre terrible masque d’homme horriblement sévère se cache une bonne humeur que beaucoup auraient bien raison de vous envier" ([Ilg a Rimbaud, Zurich, le 19 février 1888]: 59).

"Ne vous faites pas de mauvais sang, mon cher, j’en aurais bien plus de raisons et je m’en passe. C’est comme si le diable régnait en Abyssinie depuis une année, tout va de travers et l’on ne sait plus de quel côté se tourner" ([Ilg a Rimbaud, Antotto, le 9 mai 1890]: 176).

****Arthur Rimbaud, Correspondance 1888-1891 (Gallimard: 1965).

"Incroyable est le nombre d’ouvrages qu’il put lire en quelques mois: le principal lui en prêtait, ainsi qu’Izambard, Deverrière et Bretagne. Il dévorait tout avec un égal appétit: la philosophie, la sociologie, la politique, les oeuvres de Thiers, Mignet, Tocqueville, Edgar Quinet, Proudhon, Louis Blanc... et naturellement les auteurs classiques, les poètes — sans ometter la Bible souvent consultée" (: 62).

"Cette lettre à Mme Rimbaud, que contenait-elle? Une facture! Izambard demandait le remboursement des frais que lui avait occasionnés son élève..." (: 89).

"Bientôt, tout bascula dans l'écoeurement du contact avec la soldatesque débraillée; c’etait plus qu’il n’en pouvait supporter. Si profond fut son dégoût qu’il brisa son élan et que sa foi révolutionnaire coula à pic" (: 107). 

"...Rimbaud, déçu à son égard (refuser un voyage en Russie, une vie de luxe!), lui retira sa confiance..." (: 111).

“Mallarmé dit de Gautier qu’il est un voyant, Gautier le dit de Baudelaire, Nerval le dit de lui-même... Mais Rimbaud prend le mot dans uns sens biblique: celui qui voit au-delà des choses de Dieu” (: 115). 

[livres demandées par Rimbaud dans la bibliothèque de Charleville: “traités de sorcellerie, de sciences occultes ou encore des romans, de contes ou de vers libertins (Restif de La Bretonne, Parnasse satyrique, etc.)” (: 119);] 

"Rapidement, son crédit baissa, on le considéra comme un détraqué... Les plus indulgents virent en lui un raté de génie, une étoile filante qui brille intensément avant de finir en poussière..." (: 140). 

"...un reflet de l’enseignement musical de Cabaner qui, à l’hôtel des Etrangers, donnait des leçons de piano à Rimbaud" (: 149). 

"'Nous apprenons l’anglais à force... dans Edgar Poe, dans les recueils de chansons populaires, dans Robertson, etc.'" (: 198). 

"Rimbaud se vit refuser la communication des oeuvres du marquis de Sade, une autorisation spéciale étant nécessaire..." (: 199). 

"Mon frère Arthur, écrit Vitalie dans son Journal, ne partageait point nos travaux agricoles, la plume trouvait auprès de lui une occupation assez sérieuse pour qu’elle lui permît de ne..." (: 224). 

"En proie à une dépression nerveuse comparable à celle qu’avait connue Verlaine en décembre 1872, il fit comme lui; par lettre ou télégramme, il pria sa mère de venir... Mme Rimbaud comprit que là était son devoir et se mit en route avec sa fille Vitalie âgée de seize ans..." (: 238).

"Ce qu’il voulait, c’était s’armer pour l’existence et compenser pour la pratique e langues étrangères le déficit de son bagage universitaire... il se plongea avec frénésie dans l’étude de la langue allemande, dévorant journaux, livres et revues" (: 244).

"Le piano devint à cette époque une des passions de Rimbaud. On raconte qu’à la suite du refus de sa mère de lui acheter ou louer un, il avait entaillé la table de la salle à manger en forme de clavier pour exercer ses doigts... Et puis, au cours de cet hiver, il se mit, comme un forcené, à l’étude de langues étrangères, le russe, l’arabe, l’hindoustani, l’amaharina, etc... Afin que personne ne le dérange... il s'enferme à plusieurs reprises dans une armoire" (: 260). 

"L’année 1876 s’ouvrit dans la musique: Mme Rimbaud consentit en effet à louer un piano, espérant peut-être retenir Arthur à la maison" (: 263). 

"A Hambourg, entré par désouvrement dans un casino, il vit fondre au jeu ses économies" (: 273). 

"Le médecin de bord aurait diagnostiqué une inflammation des parois de l’abdomen provoquée par des marches excessives" (: 277). 

"...le 2 novembre, il commanda à des librairies de Paris, par l’intermédiaire de sa mère ou de sa soeur, quantité de livres techniques traitant de métallurgie, hydraulique, navigation, architecture navale, maçonnerie, fonerie, scierie, tannerie, textiles... — même le manuel du fabricant de bougies!" (: 289). 

"Sur ce voyage, qui ne fut pas de tout repos, nous n’avons que peu de renseignements: l’accueil des indigènes fut amical, nous dit Alfred Bardey, mas celui des lions le fut moins: Sotiro dut rentrer sur une mule car l’un d’eux avait dévoré son cheval" (: 294). 

"... Rimbaud eut alors tout le temps de réfléchir et de se convaincre qu’il n’avait pas l’âme d’un commerçant et que sa vraie vocation était d’être explorateur-écrivain..." (: 298). 

"On a retrouvé aussi tout un lot de photographies prises par lui avec son fameux appareil et conservées presque toutes au Musée Rimbaud de Charleville-Mézières..." (: 303).

"...et avoir au moins un fils que je passe le reste de ma vie à élever à mon idee, à orner et à armer de l’instruction la plus complète qu’on puisse atteindre à cette époque... De cette époque date son penchant pour l’islamisme dont nous verrrons d’autres manifestations: le 7 octobre 1883, il comande chez Hachette un Coran, texte arabe et français. 'Comme les musulmans, dit-il encore, je sais que ce qui arrive c’est tout'" (: 304).

"Il est infatigable. Son aptitude pour les langues, une grande force de volonté et une patience à toute épreuve le classent parmi les voyageurs accomplis... Rimbaud, de son côté, fut ravi de faire la connaissance de Borelli: enfin quelqu’un d’intelligent!" (: 327).

"Je sors de l’opération avec une perte de 60% sur mon capital, sans compter vingt et un mois de fatigues atroces..." (: 333). 

"A Obok, il embarqua sur un navire de la Compagnie nationale, avec son domestique Djami Wadaï, âgé de seize à dix-sept ans, qu’il avait ramené de Harar pour le sauver de la famine" (: 334). 

"...et la confirmation de la présence au Caire du jeune Djami" (: 337). 

"... les exemples de son insociabilité sont nombreux. Un jour il accepta de se joindre à une partie de chasse organisée par un groupe d’Eurpéens mais, le soir, au rassemblement... on ne le trouva plus; il était rentré tout seul sans avertir personne..." (: 354-55). 

"...sa charité, très discrète et large..." (: 356). 

[assimilation du Coran (“il... devint propagandiste”) et des autres costumes musulmans; “ses interprétations personnelles auraient soulevé des colères” (: 357);] 

"Il fallut recourir à la morphine... Toujours il se croyait à Harar; sa soeur, il l’appelait Djami; il la bousculait" (: 389). 

Pierre Petitfils, Rimbaud (Paris: Julliard, 1982).

See also: 

- Georges Bataille et la part maudite; 

- Poetry & the Avant-Garde tradition; 

- Kitsch, Neo-Kitsch, Anti-Kitsch;

- Cartografia de Água-Viva; 

- Modern Literature and Esotericism: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé & others;

- défi du non-circoncis;

- What is the meaning of sacer in Homo Sacer?

- Communauté Elective; 

- Écriture/Violence (Blanchot); 

- l'articulation I (Blanchot);

- l'articulation blanchotienne II; 

- parler est une chose grave; 

- who is afraid of Sylvia Plath? (& e. e. cummings);

- Manuel Puig & la cara de Juan Carlos;
- Juan Carlos Onetti sobre la crítica literaria & la literatura;

- Leonor Acevedo Suarez: la madre;

- Concretos &/ou Brazilian Inteligentsia;

- Cordiais Saudações;

- Two invisible phanopoeias & a silence (by Arnaldo Antunes) + Alice Ruiz;
- Podem ficar com a realidade (Leminski);

- Poème du retour: Paulo Leminski et l'éternel moustache de Nietzsche;

- A Vida por 1 Traço; 

- Augusto Meyer and Machado de Assis;

- Pour une littérature mineur: Mário Quintana as I see him;

- Pau Brasil (Oswald de Andrade);
- Mario de Andrade, tel que je l'imagine (bricolage & fragments);
- Noite Morta (Manuel Bandeira, 1921);
- Favorite Drummond (with translation);

- Interactive while indifferent—Kinds & Phantasmagoria circa 1900;

- Da Ursa à Ursa Maior: Perspectivismo e Analogismo na Literatura Brasileira; 

- Clarice Lispector e a Tradição do Romance de Vanguarda: Contrapontos;

- Entre vida ativa e experiência literária: aporias da relação entre o eu e os outros;

- A Stragegy for Writting: Contracting Contemplation in Budapeste and Leite Derramado;

- conversa de etiqueta (peça em 1/2 ato); 

Boswell, Dover & others on male homosexuality (history, anthtropology)

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"No evidence supports the common idea that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are incompatible; much data suggests the contrary" (: 9). 

"Far fewer people are aware that Oscar Wilde was a husband and father than that he was gay and had a male lover" (: 10).

"It is unlikely that at any time in Western history have gay people been the victims of more widespread and vehement intolerance than during the first half of the twentieth century" (: 23).

"Richard lion Heart, Edward II, the Duc d'Orléans, the Prince de la Roche sur Yon, the Grande Condé, the Maréchal de Vendôme — all these men noted for matial skill or valor were also noted for being gay" (: 25).

"... beauty was not considered exclusively in terms of youth... 'as garland bearers for Athena, old men are often chosen, demonstrating that there is beauty in every stage of life'" [Xenophon, Symposium 4.17] (: 29, n. 54).

"In a now famous remark, Edward Gibbon observed that 'of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct', meaning heterosexual. If Gibbon was right, the Roman Empire was ruled for almost 200 consecutive years by men whose homosexual interests, if not exclusive, were sufficiently noteworthy to be recorded for posterity" (: 61).

"In fact intense love relations between persons of the same gender figure prominently in the Old Testament — e.g. Saul and David, David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi — and were celebrated throughout the Middle Ages in both ecclesiastical and popular literature as examples of extraordinary devotion, sometimes with distinctly erotic overtones" (: 105).

"Sexuality appears to have been largely a matter of indifference to Jesus. His comments on sexual mores are extremely few, especially in comparison with the frequency of his observations on such matters as wealth and demonic possession, which were largely ignored by later Christians... When confronted with adulterers, he recommended no punishment and clearly suggested that the sins anyone else might have committed were of equal gravity" (: 114). 

"A Christian contemporary in the West, Ausonius, kept in his library volumes of homosexual literature which were considered scandalous even by Roman standards... and took delight in translating from Greek to Latin such tidbits as Strato's puzzle about four sex acts being performed simultaneously by three men" (: 132).

"Saint Augustine himself, writing in this tradition, expressed the love he felt for a friend of his youth, whose death so desolated him that he was driven to God in unbearable pain..." (: 135).

"Almost without exception the few laws against homosexual behaviour passed before the thirteenth century were enacted by civil authorities without advice or support from the church" (: 174).

"Regular confession and spiritual direction were in any case not widespread in the Middle Ages outside areas directly controlled by cathedral chapters or religious orders. Except for the clergy, few people made regular confessions more than once a year" (: 182).

"An entire genre of Germanic literature revolves around ceremonial insults... in which one warrior accuses another of having been sexually passive with him or others... It seems probable from the sum of the evidence that among some of the Germans certain men fulfilled a role similar to that of the berdache among American Indians, adopting feminine social roles and being sexually passive to another male, and such relationships may have been institutionalized as 'marriages' among them" (: 184).

"... most Muslim cultures have treated homosexuality with indifference, if not admiration. Almost without exception the classic works of Arabic poetry and prose, from Abu Nuwas to the Thousand and One Nights, treat gay people and their sexuality with respect and casual acceptance... The Arabic language contains a huge vocabulary of gay erotic terminology, with dozens of words just to describe types of male prostitutes" (: 194).

"Poems about the physical allore of a young man's first beard constitute an entire genre of Arabic poetry" (: 195). 

"Homosexual love imagery was a standard currency of Islamic mystical writings both in and out of Spain. Many of the authors of gay erotic poetry on the Iberian peninsula were teachers of the Qur'an, religious leaders, or judges; almost all wrote conventional religious verse as well as love poetry" (: 197).

"Only anal intercourse with a married man seemed to Burchard a grave sin, but even if committed habitually this sin did not incur a penalty as severe as for a single instance of heterosexual adultery" (: 205).

"The twelfth-century 'revival' of love included gay people and their passions no less than other... the proportion of gay literature surviving from this period is astonishing" (: 209).

"... it is difficult to question the unanimity and equanimity with which chroniclers allude to the sexual orientation of Richard Lion Heart, the crusading king whose valor became the symbol of chivalric idealism... Richard gave every indication of being profoundly Catholic: he heard mass daily for much of his life and was the driving force behind the third crusade" (: 231).

"Homosexuality occurs so frequently in the [Arabian] Nights that it would be impossible to cite even the major instances" (: 257, n. 54).

"Most of the attitudes of fanaticism and intolerance which are today thought of as characteristically 'medieval' were in fact common only to the later Middle Ages... Perhaps the single most prominent aspect of the period from the later twelfth to the fourteenth century was a sedulous quest for intellectual and institutional uniformity and corporatism throughout Europe" (: 269-70).

"The Franciscans came perilously close to being declared heretical before their final acceptance by the church" (: 275).

****John Boswell, Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (University of Chicago Press, 1980). 

"... a certain Theron chopped off his own thumb and challenged a rival erastes to do the same... The most remarkable anecdote of this kind, however, comes from the early fourth century B.C... [and] tells of a man willing to die for a youth about whom he knew no more than the visual stimulus of bodily beauty could tell him" (: 51).

"... a boy is compared to a horse which, ‘sated with barley’, has ‘come back to our stable wanting a good charioteer’... ‘Barley’ (krithai) is comic slang for ‘penis’..." (: 58-9).

"... the publicity associated with modern ‘pin-ups’ belonged to males rather than females..." (: 66).

"Timarkhos, according to Aiskhines, was in just such a position while supported as an expensive male prostitute by Misgolas; his money went on luxurious food, gambling, hetairai and girl-musicians, and later in life he allegedly displayed a highly-developed heterosexual appetite, pursuing other men’s wives" (: 67).

"The analogy between an ancient homosexual and modern heterosexual society can be pursued further if we extend the category ‘modern’ to include the presentation of respectable British society in the literature of the nineteenth century. The good woman, in this literature, does not desire or seek sexual intercourse…" (: 90).

"The assumption that all homosexual submission is mercenary, and with this a total silence on the possible emergence of extreme devotion, courage and self-sacrifice from a homosexual relationship, is analogous to another characteristic feature of comedy, the assumption that all holders of administrative offices feather their own nests" (: 145).

****Sir Kenneth James Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Duckworth, 1978).

"Research over the past ten years has tended to confirm... that boy-inseminating ritualized homosexuality in certain traditional societies of Melanesia is prehistoric... Comparative scholars such as Greenberg believe that this tradition should be seen as a survival of a Paleolithic practice once widespread throughout the world" (: xv).

"Through successive sexual experiences with males and females, I would guess, first only with males—and later with younger boys in addition to marital sex—the East Bay man becomes a whole social and sexual person. It is a sexual course of life, incidentally, that never alters until death, since East Bay adult men, after they are married, and even as grandfathers, may continue inseminating boys" (: xxxii).

"'The ideological reason for insemination is to "grow" the boys into men, but homosexuality appears for all practical intents and purposes to be grounded in personal affection rather than obligation'" [Knauft] (: xxxii).

"Initial reports in this area [Lower Fly River] came from the Fly River delta and Kiwai Island... These small tribal groups were once fierce warriors. All males were initiated into a secret cult... Beardmore... a missionary, first mentioned that 'sodomy is regularly indulged in' on the left bank of the Fly'" (: 18).

"Given the available Melanesian data, our survey conservatively results in between 10 to 20 percent of all Melanesian cultures having ritualized homosexuality as defined" (: 56).

"[Ritualized homosexuality] does not make these males into what we Westerners call 'homosexuals'; these data instead challenge our own views about what that category means, and what parts of nature and nurture it is made from. Perhaps we should now better look to understand how the fluidity of the human condition allows this Melanesian phenomena and what, in a general sense, bisexuality is all about" (: 65). 

****Gilbert H. Herdt (Ed.), Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (University of California Press, 1993).

"Although homosexual roles may be recognized, mere involvement in a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex does not become the basis for classifying someone as a distinct type of person. This remains true in all the early civilizations, as well as in feudal social systems" (: 14). 

"In Greek or Roman antiquity, homosexuality was not—as far as we can tell—rare, and was not assumed to reflect something intrinsically distinctive about those who engaged in it" (: 17).

"Although most berdaches seem to have maintained the role for life, Spier tells of a Klamath adolescent who wore women's garb and perfomed women's tasks, but later abandoned the female and became a chief who married seven wives" (: 43).

"The manang bali of the Iban (Sea Dyak) of turn-of-the-century Sarawak (in northwestern Borneo) adopted female costume in obedience to supernatural instructions conveyed in dreams and seduced young men. Toward the end of the nineteenth century they were populars as curers—in fact, they were the most highly regarded of shamans" (; 57). 

"Until recently, Mangaia, one of the Cook Islands, had several transvestites, but ccording to Marshall, they did not choose male sexual partners. Nor did the transvestites of Rapa, south of the Society Islands. Indeed, one extremely effeminate man had a wife and several children" (: 59).

"The extremely wide dispersion of the transvestite shaman role, among peoples whose later ways of life have been very diverse, suggests that the role does date back to the late Paleolithic (if not earlier)" (: 64).

"Lafitau, a French Jesuit missionary in early-eighteenth-century Canada, describes intense and socially recognized 'special friendships' among Indians from coast to coast..." (: 70).

"In addition to marrying Hera and chasing nymphs and women, the Greek Zeus adbucted Ganymede. Apollo impregnated nymphs and women, but also fell in love with the male Hyacinth. Poseidon, who married Amphitrite and pursued Demeter, also raped Tantalus" (: 93). 

"... one of the assinu's [male-homosexual cult prostitute] functions was to serve as the receptive sexual partner of male worshipers in anal intercourse, perhaps particularly with those who wanted trouble to leave them..." (: 97).

"The aristocratic warrior societies do seem to have had extensive male homosexuality, which was completely accepted... According to Aristotle, the Celts steemed homosexuality... Diodorus Siculus found Celtic women charming, and every indicator of their social status suggests that it was quite high. Nevertheless, he added, 'the men are much keener on their own sex; they lie around on animal skins and enjoy themselves...'" (: 111).

"The city of Thebes maintained an elite Sacred Band of three hundred homosexual lovers—older heniochoi (charioteers) and their young paraibatai (companions), who were given a complete set of military equipment on reaching maturity" (: 115).

"The potentates of the East found eunuchs politically invaluable" (: 123). 

"...biblical references to Sodom do not even mention homosexuality; they suggest that the city was destroyed because of its inhospitality to guests... even if—as I have argued— homosexuality was involved, it was not consensual homosexuality but homosexual rape" (: 136).

"... Greeks assumed that ordinarily sexual choices were not mutually exclusive, but rather that people were generally capable of responding erotically to beauty in both sexes... It was said of Alcibiades... 'that in his adolescence he drew away the husbands from their wives, and as a young man the wives from their husbands'" (: 144).

"To be sure, it was recognized that some men preferred women, and others, male partners. Atheneus, for example, remarked that Alexander the Great was indifferent to women but passionate for males" (: 145).

"This preference for youths stemmed from the intensely competitive individualism of Greek male culture... When the partners were of similar social status (brother, friends), possession implied status derogation, and this was an insult... Most men accommodated these status considerations by choosing a status inferior (a slave or prostitute), or a free younger partner, whose youth made him ineligible for military service or political office..." (: 146-47).

"Polybus, a Greek historian who visited Rome in the second century B.C., reported that most young men had male lovers. Many of the leading figures in Roman literary life in the late Republic—Catullus, Tibullus, Vergil, and Horace—wrote homophile poetry" (: 154).

"Many a young [Roman] man had a concubinus—a male slave to use sexually before marriage" (157).

"When the Aztecs and Incas legislated against homosexuality, they may have been trying to substitute the political state and its official religion for the shamans of tribal society... [who] were frequently male-to-female tranvestites who engaged in sexual relations with other men..." (: 165). 

"Notwithstanding the opposition of Islamic religious law, a de facto acceptance of male homosexuality has prevailed in Arab lands down to the modern era, though in some times and places discretion has been required" (: 177). 

"The Vendidad was a product of the Parthian period, the work of magis who synthesized the Zoroastrian cult with the older Aryan fire worship. Their hatred of Hellenistic culture may have added to an earlier opposition to cult prostitution, producing an expecially extreme hostility to homosexuality" (: 189).

"The treatment of sexual offenses in Leviticus suggests that the level of anxiety with sex was quite high" (: 195).

"For Plato, the ideal life was to be spent seeking and discussing Beauty, Truth, and Good. Although bodily perfection could inspire this pursuit, lust itself was evil because it leads to an undignified, slavish, animallike surrender to the passions" (: 203). 

"[Morton Smith] concludes that Jesus broke sharply with Jewish legal restrictions, believing that his religious-magical powers gave him and his followers freedom to disobey the Law. He thinks Jesus conducted secret baptismal initiations at which mystical secrets were imparted, and at which ritual homossexual intercourse may have taken place..." (: 217).

"Pederasty, [John Chrysostom] insists, is so dangerous, and yet so omnipresent, that to protect them from it, boys should be sent to live in monasteries for one or two dozen years starting in late childhood" (: 222).

"Had [Augustine] endorsed the doctrine that only virgins could be saved, he would have had to accept the absolute impossibility of his own salvation" (: 224-25).

"Cult tranvestism persisted for centuries in Scandinavia, along with other pagan religious practices and a traditional way of life" (: 243).

"Evidently the Vandals' horror of effeminacy, on which Salvian commented, did not preclude submission to pederasty when it was military advantageous—and probably in other circumstances" (: 249).

"In [the chanson that commemorates the life of William Marshall (1145-1219)] King Henry II loves his page, who is his first cousin. After expelling William from his court for having an affair with his wife, Henry got rid of his wife and displayed great affection for William... In Lancelot, Sir Gawain prays that God turn him into a beautiful woman so that he will be loved by the unknown knight" (: 257).

"Male homosexuality... in Japan... during the feudal age... flourished among the military aristocracy. A samurai warrior went to battle accompanied by a favorite youth, who also served as a sexual partner... Literary sources depict the relationships as highly romantic, sustained by undying loyality... The relationships were not only accepted, but considered extremely desirable, especially in those regions of Japan where physical strenght and military prowess were highly prized" (: 260).

"By the year 1300, Europe had become distinctly less hospitable to those who engaged in homosexual acts than it had been two hundred years earlier" (: 279).

"... church's claim that it, rather than the secular rulers, should exercise spiritual authority, was not easy to maintain while the moral standards of the clergy were so vulnerable to criticism" (: 281).

"Projecting one's own unacceptable desires onto someone else is ... reaction formation... hostility toward those believed to be homosexual should be greater if they are one's own sex, for it is they who as potential sexual partners should arouse the greatest anxiety... (: 289). 

"In Russia, homosexuality had long been under church jurisdiction, but at the start of the eighteenth century Peter the Great, who often slept with his soldiers, hypocritically made the prohibition [against homosexuality] secular" (: 303).

"According to Saint Bernardino of Sienna, Florence and other early-fifteenth-century Tuscan cities had such a reputation for sodomy that Genoa would not hire Tuscan schoolmasters, and boys walking down the streets of Florence were in greater danger than girls of being sexually assaulted" (: 305). 

"Antonio Becadelli's widely read Hermaphroditus... was made court poet at Pavia and was knighted at Naples... Cellini's sodomy convictions did not stand in the way of his receiving comissions from the church for his sculptures... Many of the homosexually active men were also actively heterosexual... Cellini had affairs with women and eventually married. Caravaggio lived for years with one of his male models, but later had a relationship with a woman... [they] probably identified themselves and were considered by others as libertines" (: 308-309). 

"The conjuncture of extremely harsh legislation justified primarily on religious grounds, erratic enforcement, and popular indifference, punctuated by infrequent episodes of repression, remained characteristic of social responses to homosexuality from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, but began to change in the modern era" (: 347).

"Benthan, the philosopher of rational hedonism, argued that same-sex love was thoroughly innocuous, and rebutted one argument after another for its criminalization. Fearing the prejudices against homosexuality would jeopardize his reform program—and possibly his life—he never published these writings. Charles Fourier went even further..." (: 351).

"The new capitalist order contributed to this stigmatization and to the intensification of prosecutions which occurred late in the century in the United States, England, and Europe. It did so by intensifying competition between men, by sharpening the sexual division of labor and strengthening the ideology of the family, and by stimulating the invention of medical explanations of social deviance" (: 356).

"[Freud] was aware of his own erotic attraction to Fliess, which he would surely have been reluctant to label a sign of degeneracy. Nor could he easily label his patients degenerate... Freud had assisted one of his teachers in research on sex alternation in crustacea and was thus quite familiar with these findings. They were widely interpreted as demonstrating that sexuality was complex..." (: 423).

"In 1905 [Freud] told a newspaper reporter that 'homosexuals must not be treated as sick people, for a perverse orientation is far from being a sickness'... Though Freud may have built on the scientific discoveries of others, the particular emphases in his work reflect the culture and political milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna. The Austrian aristocracy of the late nineteenth century had neither been defeated by the haute bourgeoisie nor assimilated to it. As the latter became more affluent, they began to emulate the sensuosity and aestheticism of the aristocracy... eroticism pervaded the art of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka" (: 426). 

"An experimental study of aggression toward homosexuals... found that male-heterosexual college students who had negative views of homosexuality were more aggressive toward homosexual targets they believed to be similar to themselves than toward those they considered dissimilar. When the targets were heterosexual, the response pattern was just the opposite... This difference in patterns of agressiveness suggests that hostility toward homosexuals may be provoked by an irrational sense of personal threat aroused by unconscious homosexual impulses" (: 448). 

****David F. Greenberg. The Construction of Homosexuality (The University of Chicago Press, 1988).

See also: 

- Pier Paolo Pasolini;

- Orlando 06/12;

- Most Interesting LGBTQIA+'s Movies; 

- Série, presque à genoux with thread; 

- Lost Splendor: Felix Yussupov's autobiography (Bob Atchison's site); 

- Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair (a paper by James D. Steakley, Studies in Visual Communication, Spring 1983);