The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. The novel is haunted by the character of Jacques Rigaut, the French dadaist, gigolo, drug addict, dandy, and suicide. At irregular intervals throughout the novel, we listen in on the interior monologue of Rigaut on the the night of his suicide.…
Simone Kahn was the first wife of André Breton, founder of Mouvement Dada in Paris and more famously known as the lifelong "pope of Surrealism." But before she knew Breton, Kahn, a young student at the Sorbonne, was the close friend of Jacques Rigaut, the dadaist poet, gigolo, drug addict, and suicide who haunts the…
Hot on the platen of my Smith-Corona Coronet, a chapter serving to "sign" the work begins to emerge. Who is this Ed Desautels, anyway? [If you keep clicking the photo, you'll eventually find a size you can comfortably read.]
Another glimpse into the first draft as it emerges: .... Could it be that I, poor ghost of a thousand fragments clustered in the suspect ectoplasm of the vaporized artilleryman, the failed shade imprisoned in the sliver universe, a misty specimen trapped as if between glass slides of infinitesimal thickness, pliant panes that allow only…
But how can I be sure of anything in the state in which I find myself? I feel as if extracted from someone else's dream, as if I--the would-be poet--were nothing more than a failed verse written in crabbed script, left adrift in the wake of a passing train, skimming the platform of a deserted…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 