Archive for Montparnasse Cemetery

Charles Baudelaire

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , , on July 15, 2024 by Cade

April 09, 1821 – August 31, 1867

To call Charles Baudelaire a “Romantic” poet would be a significant undersell. For sure, he was one of the preeminent French poets of the 19th century and drew heavily on his Romantic forebears, but one does not take the beauty, imagination and natural ideals of the Romantic movement and forge a new movement based on exoticism and excess by resting on the laurels of the past. Largely credited with helping found the Decadent literary movement, Baudelaire was as widely regarded for his poems as he was for his lavish lifestyle.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment »

Susan Sontag

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , on March 4, 2024 by Cade

January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag was an American novelist and essayist whose criticism covered a wide range of topics throughout the 1960s, ’70s and 80s. Her breakout work was 1964’s essay Notes on ‘Camp’ which popularized “camp” as an aesthetic sensibility. She went on to write Against Interpretation, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor as well as a number of novels and other fictional works. Sontag was also a filmmaker and occasionally directed theatre…including a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a war-torn theatre in Bosnia in 1994. She was a prolific activist who wrote and spoke out about subjects like the Vietnam war, feminism, human rights and the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment »

Eugène Ionesco

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , , on January 1, 2024 by Cade

November 26, 1909 – March 28, 1994

There are absurdist playwrights. Then there is Eugène Ionesco.

Born in Romania, Ionesco spent most of his youth in France. He would alternate between the two countries depending upon whether there was a war or not, but eventually, he settled with is family in Paris. Following a transcendental experience in which he found himself awestruck by a crystal clear, sunny day in the idyllic French countryside as a young man, he was taken by how juxtaposed that feeling was to the actual world around him…which he regarded as decaying and monotonous. The moment would have a lasting impression on his life and his art.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment »

Jean-Pierre Rampal

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , on November 6, 2023 by Cade

January 07, 1922 – May 20, 2000

Quick! Name a French flautist more famous than Jean-Pierre Rampal.

Marcel Moyse? Please.

René Le Roy? Nice try.

Georges Barrère? Maybe. But did Barrère ever guest star on The Muppet Show?

I didn’t think so.

Literally born to play the flute, Jean-Pierre Rampal was the son of Joseph Rampal, himself a famous French flautist who studied alongside the likes of Moyse and Le Roy. The younger Rampal started studying the instrument at the age of 12 and only went on to globally re-popularize its use as a classical solo instrument in the decades after World War II. Let’s see René and Marcel do that!

Continue reading →

Leave a comment »

Samuel Beckett

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , , , on September 11, 2023 by Cade

April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, Ireland, just outside of Dublin. He studied literature at Trinity College. He played cricket. He traveled. He wrote. While teaching in Paris – a city that would eventually become his full-time home – Beckett met fellow Irish author James Joyce and their interactions and relationship would eventually solidify the direction of Beckett’s literary career. By the time he was 40, he realized that, while Joyce pushed for knowledge as fuel for his creativity, Beckett himself was better suited to embrace his own “ignorance”. This decision freed Beckett up to concentrate his writings on the everyday absurdity and bleakness of life.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment »

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , on February 25, 2014 by Cade

sartre_debeauvoir1January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986
June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980

When French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre was asked how he would like to be remembered (keeping in mind, he HATED accolades and once refused the Nobel Prize for literature), he responded:

“I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet…. If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don’t ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived,… how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself.”

He seems like a delight.

But, he was pretty smart and a pretty good writer. And fellow existential writer – and feminist social theorist – Simone de Beauvoir, fancied him some. The two had a long relationship and partnership that was anything but monogamous and oh-so French.

Continue reading →

1 Comment »