The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. Here my protagonist, Ray Burke, in the midst of an unsuccessful job hunt, obsessed by the esoteric project he's undertaken to translate the complete annotated works of Dadaist-suicide Jacques Rigaut, and overwhelmed by the voices of French Dadaists and Surrealists who…
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. It is also narrated, in part, by a reformed Père Ubu. In this fragment, Ubu introduces the setting for much of the…
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…
This experiment arose from a Craft Note post I published last week, titled How Things Begin, in which I described how my work arises from a single line, to which I append more lines. To demonstrate the process, and as something of a challenge to myself, I'm attempting to write a story "in public." What…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 