Sam Kunkel, scholar of Symbolist literature and editor of Faunus, the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, has just announced pre-orders for his study Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor (First to Knock Books & Records), due to be published in October.
In fin-de-siecle Paris, the 26 year old Satie, feeling his highly original, prismatic piano work unappreciated, decided to launch his own autocephalous church instead. Announcing his bohemian apartment was now an abbey, Satie issued proclamations and hurled maledictions on his artistic and magical rivals, in a campaign bizarrely mingling the spiritual and the satirical. This remarkable episode in Satie’s career was a prophetic precursor of Surrealism and its rituals and banishings.
Sam Kunkel told me what had drawn him to this subject:
'I suppose what appealed to me first an foremost about the project was the humour of it. Satie’s letters and writing are incredibly funny, but it’s a very wry, nearly impenetrable sort of humor that could pass for sincerity. When I looked into it further, I saw that his acerbic letters of excommunication, despite their ludicrous framing, rested upon a bedrock of sincerity due to what he perceived as a lack of recognition. I thought it would be interesting to not only present them, but to flesh out the context at the same time, to show both sides of the coin rather than simply presenting the letters as isolated objects where they could be simply passed off as the scribbling of an eccentric pianist.'
For orders from the publisher's website only, the book is accompanied by a limited-edition flexi-disc recording of Satie’s Leit-motiv du Panthée performed, as intended, as an accompaniment to a reading of Joséphin Péladan’s Le Panthée.
(Mark Valentine)
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