Satan runs the show
The alarm went off too early. The coffee pot blew up in my hands. My antibiotics are giving me the shits. Deauville smells like a wet horse. What’s the sense of living if it’s just drinking instant coffee and walking on shards of glass?
I have to write. Get the monster out. Free the beast. All these pages inside me, I have a vague idea of their pedigree, and I am starting to figure out how it all works: I’m going to have to DELIVER THEM. Once the labor is over, exhausted, drenched, incredulous, I’ll glance, cagey, at this ugly and wrinkled baby.
I oversold an empty shell. Interviews with the local press have started. I made my pitch, and everyone thinks it’s great.
“Hey, you’re Bukowski!”
My colleagues have started calling me Bukowski. They think it’s pretty damn cool to have Bukowski in the house.
I want to flee. Disappear. Someplace where the boards are wider. The crowd denser. Dissolve myself in alcohol and gambling. But I just keep coming back. Maybe I’ll leave this place when the affair with this girl ends. Maybe the affair with this girl will end when I leave this place.
God, if she could just keep her mouth shut. If we could just stop having sex. If I could free my mind. I need to write.
Translated from the French by Craig Lund
Samuel Lebon
Ecrivain, Photographe
Photographer and writer, long editor for the rock press, Samuel Lebon develops an aesthetic text and image bordering on fiction, playing with the border between dream and reality. Passionate about the relationship between words and photography, he combines the two writings in his creations.
His book “Satan leads the ball”, published in 2020 by Editions Filigranes, thus combines a novel and a photographic series of the same name, produced largely in Deauville for the Festival Planche (s) Contact. Before being published, this project was exhibited in the form of a writer’s room, like a mise en abîme: The manuscript coexisted with the images of a writer’s peregrinations à la Bukowski in an imaginary city inspired by Atlantic City.
Samuel Lebon’s photographs are regularly published in the press (Liberation, Les Inrockuptibles, Télérama, etc.). It is distributed by Hans Lucas.
