Alix's Journal

Alix s Journal is a collection of private notebooks kept by Canadian photographer Alix Cleo Roubaud during the last four years of her life, before her death at the age of 31. Written, in a sense, for her husband acclaimed novelist, poet, and mathematician Jacques Roubaud Alix s Journal straddles the [...]
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Alix s Journal is a collection of private notebooks kept by Canadian photographer Alix Cleo Roubaud during the last four years of her life, before her death at the age of 31. Written, in a sense, for her husband acclaimed novelist, poet, and mathematician Jacques Roubaud Alix s Journal straddles the gap between French and English, poetry and prose, the tragic and the comic, the profound and the quotidian. Alix s idiosyncratic and revealing work gives us access to a singular consciousness, one that was profoundly influential on her husband s subsequent works, in style as well as content. The notebooks center on themes of love, marriage, photography, addiction, and death, and include examples of Alix s photographic work, whose strangeness and poignancy is enhanced by its juxtaposition with her plans for and interpretations of it. From Alix s Journal You left yesterday morning, and last night I got drunk by nine. I didn t walk straight on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where I went to post my first letter. At ten o clock I collapsed dead drunk. I woke at three and read what Nigel Nicholson wrote his parents, and read Jacques Roubaud in Change (a poem about water similar to Hockney s distortions). I asked myself why I abuse myself in this manner when I am loved and really must keep alive; why do I get drunk on an empty stomach? why do I drug myself with sleeping pills? why do I smoke? looking after oneself. I had things to do today. To fall asleep like everyone else, etc., to lead a simple regular life. To fall asleep like everyone else, that is what I want.