Autre lettre à Tony O'Neill!

Hi Tony

just read your e-mail
although I am sending you long e-mails
feel free Tony to answer the way you want
and when you want
especially now that your have to finish your manuscript
I consider our internet relation as friendly meaningful as any other
so do not worry if you do not feel to answer right now or by writing just a few lines
after all for the time being you are the one
who need time and space to get the work done
as far as I am concern
I am in a kind of free period
not much on the working table
although Ronald my relationist
wants me to get my lyrics ready for the Aut'Chose album
that I'll have to record this summer
and Claudine is going crazy
because I do not get all my poems together to form a book
and other project like an autobiographical scrapbook
with pictures and memorabilia etc
I am kind of lazy
the word in French is
FAIGNANT
which is not exactly lazy but creatively lazy

so again Tony don't worry about me
I'll understand if you cannot always answer on the dot
I have time now to write to you
and I enjoy doing it
whether it is to tell you what I feel about your work
or go on telling you about my life and way of seeing things

this morning I did not feel to go do my radio show
I wanted to have them re-play an old show
but since I wanted to talk about your books again
in direct relation to receiving «Songs from...»
if you have a chance listen this week-end
from 11 to noon at «cnv.ca»
I went with it for a whole segment of the show
and it is listen to by people all over the world
so it is interesting for the book visibility

this week end I will get a few things together
and mail them to you Monday
2-3 books with short explanations when in French
but you will always be able to get the drift because
I use a lot of English words and expressions
and I will send you 1 or 2 (if possible) cds
will make a copy of them if I cannot find the original releases
and there is a road-movie that I made in the states
a very important film on my life and all
EXIT POUR NOMADES (Exit for Nomads)
made all over Quebec and California and New Mexico
with a huge budget for that kind of a film
a cross between fiction and autobio
I will see if I can have a friend make a copy
and if I do not send everything Monday
it will follow in 2-3 weeks at the most

I might start to do a one hour radio-web show from my home
from 2 to 3 in the night early morning...
with a visual dimension
my Friday show will start having a visual next week or soon
so you will be able to see how much fucking weight I have to loose
10 to 15 pounds...
it is the methadone that give me trouble shit
on H I was so sharp...

like I said
when I go back teaching
I will have my students by your book(s) in translation(s)
and will also give the copy of «Songs from...»
to an English friend who will be able to talk about it
some of my Anglos poets friend
Endre Farkas
or Ken Norris (American)
or even Leonard Cohen
who lives close to me
and I see him at the bagel shop
so I'll see what comes first and what is best

Now Listen to me Tony
about your books of poetry
that you do not feel anymore
I went to the same phase
but believe me
(I am 60 now
fuck I hate that number
but it gives me a perspective on life at least...)
one day when you get older
you will come back to these books
and if you don't
the fans will force you to come back
and you will realise one thing (at least)
for the better or the worst
the work that we do in our first 10 years
is the stuff that makes us what we are
and that is what the fan or adept
go crazy for
when us we love what we are doing while we are doing it
and cannot understand that people go crazy
for our early work that we sometime find awkward weak etc
but is made history and made us make history
and there is nothing that we can do about it
THE PEOPLE GO NUT ABOUT THAT EARLY STUFF
that is why I say to you
write like a mother fucker
because the way you write now
will not last forever
and you will not be able to get back to that
even if you try to copy imitate yourself
look at Patti Smith doing again Horse
and Lour Reed Berlin
and Bowie will do Low or Hunky Dory etc
there is something and I realise that now
in the early writings that is spontaneous thru full candid free flow naive etc etc
so do not worry if you shy away from those books now
the will come back to hunt you no matter what
and you will learn to love them thru the people going nuts about it...

and that is that
from Nostradamus Francoeur
Johnny Shivers
from Quebec Love...

take good care
my best to Vanessa and Nico
the O'Neill love triangle!

Talk to you later
going to the resto
Claudine and Virginie
are waiting for me
rock desire

lucien

ps. Tony
you will notice
that there are less mistakes in this e-mail
I made it go thru the corrector
I should have done that for the others
And re-reading them without too much mistakes
And found them good enough
And so revealing
About writing (yours and mine)
And about life and all
Text drug and rock
that I dropped them
in Blogger Francoeur Aut'Chose
and in «lucienfrancoeur.com» Aut'Chose forum
just my e-mails
yours belong to you
so you see Tony you play a big role
writing to you about you and your work
make me write about me and my writing and all...

both of us are fucking winners!

l.f.

Hi Tony!

Hi Tony

just a fast one
I am going to the dentist
fucking methadone!

I know the translation is not done
but I can't wait for it to be
so Claudine can read it

ands wow wow wow
«Songs from the Shooting Gallery»
(what a title!)
is the one that I could not get
from Amazon Canada
and how fucking great it is
that it's the one you are sending me

now the rest is easy
I will order the other books
from Amazon Canada
as of right now!

Couldn’t be better...

I'll get my stuff ready to send
as soon as I receive your book
with I hope a return address
for me to use

I'll write a bit more
after the dentist

Hey I saw Faithfull yesterday
on the Letterman show
what a band she had
and what a song
and what a voice
but what a fucked up suit
jesus-christ!
she looked trapped in it

well o well...
she's a living legend
survivor of the glorious sixties
and how good looking was she
when she was Jagger's junkie girlfriend

ok for now

talk to you later

rock desire!

francoeur

Tony O'Oneill american writer and friend!

Hi Tony

just received your book!
I read half of it at Starbuck...
I am sky-high! Wow!

read the introduction
very pertinent
and sincere
and instructive

1. You definitely have some Rimbaud in there
mostly «A Season in Hell»...
and a bit of «Illuminations»
and why not: also some of the early poems, with rimes:
1- MA BOHÈME
2- AU CABARET VERT
3. LE BATEAU IVRE

2. Walt Whitman... for sure!
He was a «landscape poet» with an American identity, point of view...
He would have not done H with us but he would probably understood...
In a way you are, in those poems, whitmanesque... the inner landscaping of soul-searching poetry...
He was a realist... in that sense you (and I and some of those we like) are a heavy-metal realist... with hard-core tenderness...

3. Baudelaire...yeah for «Les Paradis artificiels»... but he was a moralist in the purest sense of the word!
and sometimes in the aggravating sense of the word! «Les Paradis artificiels» is a book against drugs...
Like «Cocaine» by Clapton and JJ Cale (who wrote the song) is against coke... or maybe I should say: of a painfully truthfulness...

4. Céline in the s sense of the straight forwardness of the writing...

5. Burroughs for sure! and I would add Corso... and that poet who wrote Nirvana Hotel / City Light Ed.
and Kerouac, prose and poems... or poms like he would say...
the last books of his poems published by Penguin... from his notebooks!
and also Mexico City Blues
and Ginsberg but with a restrained «handwriting»... less words... but very type of «reality sandwiches» poetry...

6. And so many other... but not that much to think of it... it is easy to write about drugs etc... but not that easy to let yourself be
seen has the complex human being that you are (that we all are for that matter)... but if we say that Whitman's landscape is America the Beautiful... your poetic landscape is America the Deceitful...

7. Lou Reed yeah... but also Patti Smith... and Bob Kaufman...

If like they say we can judge a novel by its first paragraph... we can judge a poem by its last strophe (verses)... And what about that one last strophe of yours:

«I just lay there
the King of Purgatory
with all of his adornments:
blown shot, 6:30am»

and:

«then we can lay down on the sidewalk
with the cigarette buts
and the gum
and the old movie stars:
just you
me
Rita Hayworth
and the California
moon»

and on and on...

What Woodard did for you in telling you he would publish you with more poems
well when I was 21
the most important poet of Québec (the «national poet»,- hate the word national
but take it in the sense of «appurtenance», «cultural populist identity»)
GASTON MIRON
told me after reading 12 of my acid poems in a dinner
that if I would bring him more he would publish me
and he was the creator and director
of LES ÉDITIONS DE L'HEXAGONE
the most established poetry publisher of Quebec
and one of the 5 most major publisher in all the francophone territories...
Some of the «has-been» poets of his
freaked out!
and said he could not publish such garbage
and he did just that...
the book was called
MINIBRIXES RÉACTÉS (made up words...)
all the poems in that book were written
either on acid or cannabis
or in between trips
and listening to 4 albums
1. 2 first Doors
2. LET IT BLEED
3. ABBEY ROAD


I'll send you at least
one book
one cd

maybe more
in I can find...

amitiés

Francoeur
(Johnny Shivers)

Letter to Tony O'Neill

Ok Tony
back home
read the story

it is a great read! Very well translated: I was scared before reading it because, for us québécois writers, those French translations were and still are, as far as «hip-beat-books» are concerned, badly and poorly and painfully done! The early translations of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (especially!) were so depressing... How can I explain Tony: it would be like reading a translation of Céline done by a British writer instead of an American writer... tight in the ass if I may say... A very good friend of mine, Claude Pélieu (married to artist Mary Beach and a French member of the Beat Generation and a smack user till is death) was the first translator of Burroughs and it was aggravating and I told him... But now they (the French) do a better job and your story is perfectly translated... It gets bad usually when they try to match the slang... it would sound better in «Quebecois«... but the market for such translation is to limited: so better a few bugging words in French-slang to reach a wider market. A hip book that would be translated by a Quebecois writer would read better but could not make it in the French market, but a book translated even badly by a French writer will sell in Québec! So your story has the best of both world: very well translated with no ridicule French-slang, and «Notre Dame...» will sell in all the francophone territories!!! There you go! And by the way, thank god (or Buddha) Burroughs is being or has been translated again and it is a good read! What is hard to match in the translation of American avant-garde books, is the slang: french-québécois is closer to the American idiomatic slang than «french argot»! But we do not have the market for such hip books...

Re-reading my precedent email, I noticed a lot of typing mistakes...hope it did not give y our to much trouble Tony! And by the way I thought it was touching to think of you feeding your daughter: brought back souvenirs here... As long as you can kiss the little feet of your daughter, you are safe... When you will have to stop doing it: watch out! be aware... she will be close to adolescence... and then you have to be on your toes (how do we say: «no pun intended»)! They go through their teenage years so early these days... It starts at 12... Surely due to the cell phone, Internet, reality TV etc etc and having a single daughter is very special... in all the meanings of the word! If you want to have an idea of what my little Virginia whose feet I was tenderly kissing turn out to become, type her name on Google or Facebook... Until 13, she was grunge, roots, and then... foxy Virginie, in love with a Latino rapper and delinquent! Ti stay close to Virginie, I got myself involve with her Urbano, got him in the studio recording is raps on music played by my musicians and took him on the road with me were he came on the stage at the end and did after letting him do his thing with one song we would do a rap number together and I got him some airplay on the radio! After 4 years of that relation, Virginie dumped him and came back to be our little baby at 18! And listen to this: We have 10,000 books in the house but she doesn't read (except when I find her a disturbing life bio about teenagers in distress or a young woman in hell bound skid...) Tony, You are having the best years now with you daughter... hold on to it! Think of it, how old is she ?... under 6? 5?

Like I said, and surely repeating myself: can't wait to receive the «parcel» you are sending me, and can't wait to read you upcoming novel... When you say that you find it hard to get the critic attention or something like that... Shit there are so many books being released every week (not to mention all the cds now that we can record on a laptop!)... How can one draw attention... but I think that your are doing well: man I found your book at Urban Outfitter, a hip-cool clothing store downtown Montreal! You are thus far you are one of the hot avant-garde elected selected few! They had on the shelf both colors cover... I choose the yellow one although red coca-cola is my color! But the yellow cover was the first one that caught my eyes!

In you email you mention 2-3 writers that I am going to look into! I read all Bukowski... Wow! I just re-read all Kerouac... You know, Tony, talking of not being noticed as much as we wishes, well I find it discussing to not find Kerouac in some major scalar anthology! Jesus-Christ the man changed totally the contemporary literature! And some of those university assholes do not find him worth being in their anthology... I my dreams I spit HIV saliva in their ignorant eyes! Kerouac man! Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso were found of him to the point of saying that he was the mastermind of all the beat and modern literature! So we have ourselves a long way to go... Myself, I got it made in Québec being studied in all school levels... but although I have published in France, and made my mark in the avant-garde, I have still a lot of work to do... and time is running out... I am healthy but I am sixty... ( those Beatles lyrics come to mind...)

You are so right (right?) when you say that the intelligentsia only take notice of «reality books)... but they fade away fast... and the type of writing that you do will stay! All you need is keep at it... Man look at Patricia Highsmith, she was not recognised in her own country until after 40 years of publishing best sellers... Then if you would get a bestseller you would be comfortable money wise but under so much press ion by the business to come up with a follow up that would sell as much or more!

Sorry for again writing so much... But I know one thing for sure Tony: do it while you feel it! Because nothing last! My appreciation of you work and feeling toward you personally as much as professionally will last... but the «heart pouring writing» will not last... We will go on with life individually... but we will have at least something to show in demonstration of what we are and feel for each other work and life trajectory... I took a chance sending you an email and here we are sharing like old friends...

I now have to go drive my daughter downtown Mtl, - I bought her a Jeep Liberty but daddy has to still drive her... I prefer that because it is Saturday and Saturday night tends to be a big night... Better not being stuck with a vehicle parked somewhere and the temptation to drive it high... Last year Virginie had a very bad accident: she wrecked bumper to bumper the Mustang GT that I had given her for her 18 birthdays: when I saw the car, I started shaking... I could she come out of it without a scratch... plus the fact that she was under the ... And the cups knew me and let her go without a test... When I saw the movie «Taken» 2 week ago, it shooked me to my soul... Go see it Tony but do not bring your wife: she will lock you d daughter in her room and will not let her out of her sight! But what a great movie!

Take care Tony
give my best to your wife and daughter

(I mentioned reading your book on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, etc... might not mean much but I felt like doing it...)

les gitans reviennent toujours
sur les lieux de leurs amours

Francoeur xx
(I should re-read myself for mistakes, grammage... but to lazy!

Lettre à Tony O'Oneil écrivain américain

Hi there Tony

thanks for your touching e-mail...
If it makes you feel good reading my e-mails
let me tell you that it makes it worthwhile writing them
and knowing that they understood
as coming from the bottom of my heart

today your e-mail made my day and more...

Hey Tony, Chet Baker...
I just received from France «Let's get Lost» that I ordered and although I kind of knew it would be in the European Mode,
I wanted it so bad that I still ordered it anyway... hoping that there would also be an American Mode... but no way! So I played it on
my computer via my «home cinema» projector... and today I took it to a teck who will transfer it in normal mode...

I am a huge fan of Chet... have about 30 cds and vinyl of his... Please do write the book! And if you have a chance and do not already own it, get the box-set, album size, of his French recordings... it his so fantastic...

What a super name, Nico... It was on my list .... I chose Virginie for that Stones song: «Sweet Virginia»... and the movie «Paul et Virginie»...
and «Virginia is for lovers» and because it was rare at the time...
Nico is great! And 5 years young is marvellous... it stays that way until 8... then it starts to change and slowly but surely, after 10
well the outside world takes over and at 12 the parents are not the total universe anymore... So make the best out of it my friend...
And your wife and yourself make a couple like Claudine and me: her and I the rebel the stable one! It is important that the child has both parents
idiosyncrasy...

Good luck with your novel... it seems almost there... Also can't wait to get the translation of «Down and out...» so Claudine can read it... By the way she is also a well-known poet... in Quebec and France... As a matter of fact she received one of the 2 most important literary award of the francophonie: The Tristan Tzara for poetry!...2-3 years ago...
and that made her happen in France... As far as myself over there: when my daughter was born in 1987 I stop going there and let go of my career... to stay home and do the John Lennon trip with my daughter... I'll never regret that choice I made... well sometimes a little bit... I was doing great over there: songs on the radio, TV...my own band over there... etc etc.... contracts with RCA and CBS...

Also, when I will receive your book, I will order the other from Amazon Canada... there is only one that I will have to order from Amazon Britain or may be USA: « Songs from the shooting...» And like I said I will send you some of my stuff: book(s) and cd(s) etc...

Again Chet Baker is a big thing for me... is to jazz what Jim Morrison was to rock! I have a lot of things of and about Jim Morrison...

I am going to look into John Fante... and also into the bands that you mention in «Down and out» and in your website...where I spent some time and really enjoyed it!

So Tony,... make the best of those years before you turn 50... If I could start again I would write a lot more and record a lot more outrageous stuff like I was doing in the beginning... because when I became more of a notoriety, and had Virginie, my style changed and today kids are looking into my old stuff, and I wish I had done more wild writing!... So do it while you can! We all change (luckily!) when we grow older and become more accepted... we tend, well me and most of us, to «simmer down»... is that a good expression? You know what I mean anyway...

Well I am going to listen to some Chet Baker and Art Pepper and read James Crumley «The right madness»...

Oh yeah take a look at Claudine's literary magazine on the net: «mouvances.ca»... the only one in French literature...
She just got back from Africa where she was invited to read her poetry... then spent 2 weeks in France to get her summer trip (2 months) ready... She works a lot and has the success that comes with it...

Me I am the lazy type... smack mood... I take things as they come...

Praise the Web, for making our connection possible! And for sure life will take over and take away the intensity of our e-mails, but as far as I am concern the bound is there forever... I took a chance doing what I almost never do: reach out... and I had a good intuition... we have a lot in common: the lifestyle (freak past as much as straight present); the «reality writing»... «road writing» sort of....; life as a couple with one child and a daughter... the music... the old girlfriend Suzanne (eve if it is a fiction name) who played a role... Chet Baker (another coincidence) and like they say there are no coincidence...

so take good care Tony
best of the best
to you and wife and daughter…

Poème de Amine, traduit par Claudine Bertrand

Street of Luminescent Voices

• My name is street of despair

Street of hunger & of beggars

Street of voiceless voices

And Street of Albert Saro

Where one finds my roofless studio

Daytime I see myself in the window

Sunrays witch are fixing

Hands are eating

Unhappy cheekbones

Hands are begging

Crying cheekbones

What have I done to behold that eternal mendacity

Has God forgotten the street of voiceless voices

Can faith save this street of roofless studios

Shamed by skinny legs longing for destiny

Hi there street of luminescent voices

Affirm thy digestive security

Keep me from desolation and hanger

Do not turn my vision into a dream chimera

And let forever fall the rain of despair

So that never again will there be

Those roofless studios of Albert Saro Street

Chaikin, comic, american...

Sweet Virginia qui lit en Californie, au sommet de Stone Road Canyon, un dimanche après-midi, alors que j'erre sur Hope Street en proie à la plus irréductible déréliction: «que sont mes amis devenus?» Je ne sais, moi non plus...déjà vu et que le diable emporte le reste... Virginia is forever!