Jacques Rigaut, November 4-5, 1929: Excerpt from Housebreaking the Muse

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. This fragment is from one of a number of first-person passages that present Rigaut on the night of his suicide. Rigaut Failure…

Ubu in the Arcades: Excerpt from Housebreaking the Muse

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…

Housebreaking the Muse: Excerpt

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.…

Housebreaking the Muse: Driving to the Finish in 2012

There are deadlines, and there are deadlines. All of us face an ultimate deadline we (sadly or happily, depending on your point of view) cannot foretell. If you stick around long enough, this deadline begins to weigh heavily on your conscience. Wags call this the "mid-life crisis," and I suppose there is a crisis involved.…

Housebreaking the Muse: Enter Simone Kahn

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…