hi welcome to the bathtub it's our only audio visual aid these days since we got rid of all the high tech and the Whiteboard that's it the bathtub that's it no no pixels no booze just Clear Mountain Water cruel light a day no Tech no fonts a parakeet yeah that's all we have is a parakeet we're here today to talk about one of my favorite Riders um who uh who said who sounds it sounds very pretentious to say this but he's still my favorite writer I gotta say Gustav SLO bear who is mistakenly pronounced Gustav Flo Bear by all you people who don't know what you're talking about and who haven't been corrected many times by very smart people on on on the social interweb um it's actually gustavi Flaubert gustavi Flaubert that's the problem translate that's a proper pronunciation of his name don't let anyone fool you otherwise and if you do nobody cares because this is just the bathtub we're just trying to enjoy ourselves without before we have to get up and go out into the world that's our time in the bathtub before we have to go out in the crazy world and then when we're finished with the Crazy World those are two good times to sit in the bathtub with a good book this past week or so I finally read the only book of gustavi flowerbert I'm gonna say flowbert for all you boneheads out there Flo Bears um the temptation of Saint Anthony now you may not know this I've had it on my shelf for years I've had it all probably since I can remember and uh never got around to reading it always looked a little crazy to me it's basically it's written like a it's it's a basically a drama in prose it was one of his first one of floor Bears first books he wrote it when he's a fairly young man before he had written Madame Bovary in the books he was he was known for he rewrote it throughout his life so it was of interest to him he was he he read it when he wrote the first draft he read it to some of his best friends who were good supporters of his work and they said you got to get rid of that book it sucks it's terrible so he kind of buried it for a while but he kept going back to it and he rewrote it near the end of his life and that's the that's the addition we have here an old penguin paperback with a really cool great uh interesting introduction by someone named Kitty morosovski and kitty does that I think it's a great name for a translator she does that not only the translation but she wrote a really excellent introduction to the book which I enjoyed almost as much as the book I I wanted to read it because I wanted to be I'm a completist I've always wanted to read everything in flow Bears it was the only novel of his I hadn't read and also before I'm working on a piece about him and so it's just got it was a good time to read it I it wasn't my it's a it's a kind of it's an in as it's it it's like everything he wrote It's incomparable you can't really compare anything flovera road to anything else anybody else wrote but it reminds me a lot of the kind of findis yet um what are they called the Aesthetics the the decadent generation the Oscar Wilde kind of comes out of that that those influences particularly wheezeman we talked about wheezeman quite a while back now he's all rabor against nature and uh he wrote A Few books or quite kind of about this kind of this they're very Lush and richly written and they're kind of a picture of evil of the world they're they're in many of them are influenced by Assad and Flo bear was influenced by desade of all people he loved he loved the kind of Rich craziness of the guy and um and this book is is I'll try to explain it as the best I can okay um there's one wonderful line is it in this book how does he say early in this book oh flovera says in one of his letters which I'm reading there's a big nutrient big new edition of his letters he says I'm a Mystic at bottom and I believe in nothing that's what Flo bear says now that may be kind of a nihilistic view of life but for an artist in some ways it's kind of useful because all he wanted to do was put everything he wanted to create worlds of art each one of his books is just a perfect little world I think even for its false the the temptation of Saint Anthony it's filled with imagery and Beauty in almost every sentence and every paragraph is worked out to kind of trap you into it's really it's a bathtub these are bathtub books there's they aren't to teach you anything and and again if you read Madame Bovary trying to find out about what it means to be a to cheat on your husband and how bad she was or learn immoral from anything he ever wrote you completely miss him missed the boat so you can see the influence of this book on many of those writers um that would kind of move on into you know even as someone like Arthur Mac and and or or Oscar Wilde's work and it is set in its own kind of crazy place so flow bear I want to say a few quick things about his life one is he was very sick most of his life he was not a healthy healthy guy he had he had epilepsy for large periods of his life he was very sick he really liked to run around and just you know go to whorehouses and go out with friends and have parties but he was so sick for a long time he was really spent a lot of time at home being sick and being taken care of by his mother with whom he had a very torturous and almost uh inescapable relationship with his mother his father was a very very important doctor in Ruan I can't pronounce that either ruon where he was raised I spent most of his life it was important doctor but at the same time we talked about this in that of ovary living with a doctor and seeing the things that were done to people to make them better and make them healthy the tortures they would put these people through including what they were putting uh you know the I think there was one point they were putting leeches all over floberra to prevent him from getting epilepsy and they were doing all sorts of horrible things to him and he was suffering from the treatments of epilepsy worse than the sometimes the disease itself he would also get horrible boils that were so painful he literally big huge boils all over his legs and face and arms he couldn't even get out of bed for long periods of time so to find it so he loved to read he he loved really Escapist writers like Victor Hugo big Lush romantic novels and he liked books about loving books so Madame bovary's love for books and romances which some people think satirizes her and makes her look kind of insipid it's something that he definitely understood I'm going to show you a quick couple quick I'm not going to try to give you a lesson Hussein Anthony is because I can't remember most of this stuff myself here's here's the only really picture I have of the temptation of Saint Anthony this is the Bosch version and it's very it's kind of it's kind of low-key for a lot of boss you know his Hieronymus Bosch is filled with demons and Horrors and people in Hell suffering horrible things and monsters all over him so Saint Anthony is known for being some sort of martyr for because he lived by himself and he contemplated God or did something really wonderful and wouldn't let the world interfere with his appreciation of Jesus or something anyway he was always tempted by all these monsters and the monsters that came at him and this is not the version there's a version by brugal who's probably pronouncing that wrong well as well brutal's painting that Flo bear saw when he was a young man and his skin all these demons in the background and then this kind of this monk who's trying to trying to live the good life while he's all these Temptations are around him you can sort of see Flo Bears personal affection for that story because he really was it was a bit of a severitic character he was a he was a he liked to go out just have a good time and kind of a spoiled kid and at the same time the sufferings he went through made him live a kind of quiet life he never married and his Temptations to get married were sort of torturous for him anyway so the story it's kind of as like everything he wrote um it's incredibly beautifully written every sentence is beautifully sculpted it's told in a play format so we're kind of watching Santa Nancy walking through I guess he's in the desert I think and all these different characters the Queen of Sheba comes uh someone who looks like the devil who comes his name was hilarion and then just a kind of parade of monsters from I guess with Biblical or with with ancient or with various religions monsters from various religious stories come parading through to torment this guy and he's trying to live his life without being bothered by them I'm just going to read a couple of quick quick really quick passages um I want to read this one this is another thing from the letters quoted from the letters because everybody always sounds like it sounds like Larry David you remember it's in Seinfeld the story's about nothing this whole show's about nothing there's something about that really Rings true about really wonderful books that we enjoy in the bathtub they're not about something they're they're immersive and this is something that uh Flo bear writes to this woman who's there's dodos making a lot of noise that's okay you're my Temptation there's the Temptation that Scott Bradfield is dodo she sounds like one of the Demons he writes to her what strikes me is beautiful what I would like to do is a book about nothing a book with no external tie which would support Itself by its internal force of style and I kind of again not not sure there's lit crit stuff just the beauty in the for of the form he loves form he talks about that and just the beautiful formula formal strength of paragraphs and sentences and chapters and stories and that that really Madame Bovary is just a perfect book in so many ways so perfectly written um so that's another one of the letters I just want to read a couple examples from the book um he goes around seeing all these different monsters and at one point here's a good example um all these these parades of all these monsters from all these different religions start marching past him now Idols of all Nations and all ages filed past them made of wood of metal of granite of feathers of sewn skins the oldest ones earlier than the Deluge are hidden under seaweed which hangs down like a Mane a few too tall for their bases Creak at the joints and break their backs as they walk others let sand trickle out through holes in their bellies Anthony and hilarion are enormously amused this is like a stage Direction they split their sides laughing at these at these monsters from from there there's my monster right there on dodo um now follow sheep shaped Idols they Teeter on their knock knee legs half open their eyes and stammer-like mutes let me get over here you know you just don't get you don't get this kind of entertainment anywhere do you the more they approximate to human form the more they irritate entity he hits out with his fists kicks them pitches into them they become quite frightful with tall plumes bulging ball eyes arms ending in claws sharks Jaws they're all monstrously agglomerations of all these different creatures and before these Gods men are slaughtered on Stone altars that whole passage is so clear these horrible Monsters of religion to which human beings pay a basis and Slaughter one another for their approval of these creatures at one point Anthony says how dumb one must be to worship all this all this religious crap the story is kind of framed as if he's he's he's learning to appreciate his own God but of course the whole story is about the absurdity of religion told us these beautiful beautiful images and there's creatures a whole there's just a parade of creatures it's almost all this whole thing is there's one called the MARTA chorus foreign and there's one last little Passage I can oh I just dropped it probably there's one where he's they describe what they do to other people anyway there's I can't I've not lost it because crazy dodos just lost my passage for me but there's some wonderful passages in it it's I find myself going in and out of the story so I was having trouble um oh here's the pass I want to read this is another creature I found myself going in and out of it and then really enjoying other parts and it was a little long for me um here's another creature he says uh I don't know that's not the one I wanted anyway there's one where he describes how he breathes poisons that he's he's he Slaughters human beings by the millions by just breathing and by seeing them and that just this it really is a Fantasia of just kind of horrific Beauty and it is it's a it's definitely worth reading definitely worth checking out it's not as good a read as one of my favorite we're going to read solemnvil probably next to Flo bear solombo is his historical novel set in the Roman between the Roman battles between the Romans and the uh and Hannibal whoever Hannibal's group was and they uh it's about that war and it's just it's just filled with Horrors and tragedy and great Beauties incredible novel at one point the wonderful biographer of Flo bear Jeffrey wall says that at the time this book was written everybody write it it was a very popular book that everyone had to read and and today almost nobody reads it and it it definitely needs to we want to help correct that all right so that's all I want to read there's so many wonderful passages in this in these these letters the selected letters of flow bear um it's not the first place you should go but if you are interested in fit to see that kind of really phantasmagorical kind of crazy uh 19th century pros and the and the influence on people like you Eastman and and and baudelaire portal I was a big fan of this book it's worth reading and I'm definitely glad I read it all right sorry for uh I wish I it was a couple of passages I still wanted to read but this has gone too long anyway stay safe watch out for the I think that's the man the mar Decor or the one of those creatures all right bye