santaferomantic2:“Crazy For Vincent”Hot question: to what extent is another person a dru
santaferomantic2:“Crazy For Vincent”Hot question: to what extent is another person a drug, whether a stimulant, depressant, hallucinogen or some deranged combination of the three? That’s one of the conundrums haunting Hervé Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent (originally published in 1989 and newly translated by Christine Pichini for Semiotext(e)), a question further addled by the fact that the two male lovers at its centre are forever blitzed on their own marvellous pharmacopoeia: opium (‘brown sugar’), ecstasy (‘that vile white powder’), booze or hash. This slim volume is a diary prone to dreamy wandering that chronicles the true story of Guibert’s infatuation with Vincent Marmousez, a sweet and tender hooligan who sometimes seems closer to a phantom tormenting our narrator – ‘I thought I had seen a ghost’, Guibert notes when Vincent materializes early in their relationship. Crazy for Vincent consists entirely of vertiginous highs or heartbroken comedowns, and kicks off like a lurid thriller with the titular hunk’s corpse laying on the pavement following a tumble from a third floor window. Guibert (who died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1991, aged 36) never megaphones the thought that these circumstances make his inamorato the scuzzy Parisian equivalent of Icarus, but the parallels are difficult to resist. Vincent is a goofy young daredevil watched by a (somewhat) wiser and older artist, he gets too high and dies. Pinpointing these narcotic effects, Guibert also records what the poet John Ashbery once identified as the ‘vast electrical disturbance’ that a rambunctious boy creates for anybody who’s kinda smitten, with their sense of class and sanity lost in the swirl. -- source link