World Food Books

Limited-edition version with 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.

In 1892, Erik Satie was at a crossroads. Despite having already composed some of the finest works ever written for piano, the 26-year-old was still penniless and unappreciated. His artistic ethos—a paradoxical mix of reactionary Medievalism and avant-garde absurdism—could find no quarter in fin-de-siècle Paris. And so, with his musical aspirations dashed and nowhere left to turn, Satie would turn to himself.

His subsequent revolt was as shocking as it was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Satie announced himself to be “the Parcener,” the head of a new religious order. It was, in fact, a church of his own founding—The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor.

Transforming his dilapidated apartment into an “Abbatial Church,” Satie began issuing scathing letters to prominent cultural figures who had sought to render judgment upon his Art. Targets of the Parcener’s screeds ranged from the cape-clad mystagogue, Joséphin Péladan, to the pompous composer, Camille Saint-Saëns; from the novelist Octave Mirbeau, who had dared to lampoon the Parcener, to the theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, whose unintentionally nude stage production had offended the Parcener’s moral sensibilities. The fiercest feud was reserved for music critic Henry Gauthier-Villars, whom the Parcener battled in the press for years, until the spat culminated in a physical altercation at a concert. Throughout the 1890s, luminaries, such as these, found themselves excommunicated from a church to which they had not even known they once belonged.

Inscrutable as the author himself, Satie’s writings from this brief period strike a tone that lies somewhere between fervent Catholicism, anarchistic satire, and the righteous rage of the true Artist—leaving readers befuddled as to the composer’s true intent. Yet, despite the impenetrability of his writings, the Parcener’s missives took the Parisian art scene by storm and, as Satie’s crusade grew in intensity, so too did his reputation, making this era as historically crucial as it is bewildering. Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Church was ultimately a solitary undertaking. Despite certain documents indicating that the Church expected to have more than a billion members, history would show that its congregation never grew beyond one: Erik Satie himself.

Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything is the first book dedicated exclusively to the story of Erik Satie’s Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilic translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions.

Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything was written by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19th century Symbolist literature. Previous to this book, Kunkel has also provided translations for Echoes of a Natural World—Tales of the Strange & Estranged (First To Knock, 2020); A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest—Mystical Prose Works by Édouard Schuré (First To Knock, 2021); as well as The Solar Circus by Gustave Kahn (First To Knock, 2022). Kunkel has also written extensively in French, covering topics such as Joséphin Péladan and religion in fin-de-siècle Paris. His critical reedition of Péladan’s notorious novel, Istar, was published by Éditions du Lérot in 2024, and his book, L’Orphisme et le roman post-romantique, a comparative study of the mystical novel, was released by Éditions Otrante in 2023.

Design by Bryan Cipolla

File under: Erik Satie Erik Satie First To Knock / Michigan Sound / Music Occult / Esoterica Theory / Essay Art Objects / Ephemera / A/V

The Solar Circus

by Gustave Kahn

2022

The Solar Circus
by Gustave Kahn

2022, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by First To Knock / Michigan

$40.00 - In stock -

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“Have I understood the philosophy of The Solar Circus correctly? One must savor life in a few fevered grasps, as one might squeeze all of the juice and all of the beauty from a fruit, before casting aside its useless skin.” — Albert Mockel

“Henceforth, The Solar Circus shall be one of the two or three novels that I savor during the quiet hours of dream and melancholy, when the soul surrenders to the painful nostalgia of infinity and the beyond.” — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The Solar Circus is the great forgotten masterpiece of French Symbolist literature. Written by Gustave Kahn—the man whom Stéphane Mallarmé and Jules Laforgue credited as inventing free verse poetry—the novel drips in decadent images of pastoral vistas, exotic gemstones, merfolk, and a phantasmagoric menagerie. Inverting day for night and reality for a dazzling dream, The Solar Circus tells the story of a solipsistic, isolated Bavarian count who falls in love with the star of a traveling circus. Their relationship, in both love and jealousy, dramatizes that great tension between the inner life of contemplation and the dynamic beauty of the external world. And as they set out from the count’s castle, the couple examines this duality while encountering a world in transformation: peasants in rebellion, the bright lights of London’s Orpheum theater, and even an ether-swilling Jack the Ripper who analyzes humanity through a fog of opium.

Best known as a poet and member of the Symbolist movement, The Solar Circus showcases Kahn’s talents as a narrative writer and bears the hallmarks of many of the poetic endeavors unique to late 19th century. Indeed, in the same way that the novel’s circus coaxes the count out of oppressive isolation, so too does Kahn’s prose lead the reader in new and fantastic directions. The Solar Circus is a text unlike any other, one that vacillates effortlessly between imagistic poetry and obliquely philosophical prose, prefiguring those seminal 20th century works of Modernist literature which would appear more than two decades later.

This publication marks not only the novel’s first appearance in English but also its first independent reissue since it was published in 1898. The Solar Circus has been newly translated by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19th century Symbolist literature. Kunkel has also provided translations for the First To Knock collection Echoes of a Natural World—Tales of the Strange & Estranged (2020) as well as A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest—Mystical Prose Works by Édouard Schuré (2021).

“It is a tale that is lucid, transparent, crystalline, but also enveloped in, and thick with, legend and dream. Is it an adventure or a daydream?... [A] blend of novel and legend, of poetry and prose: this transient world, dotted with figures who are painted with disarming clarity and soft style give to The Solar Circus its enigmatic and persistent charm. This novel is a true dream, drained and exhausted by the vigor of logic and thought.” — Léon Blum

“[With The Solar Circus,] Kahn is perhaps the only Symbolist to have successfully composed a novel free from the Naturalist mindset still perceptible in Against Nature.” — Sophie Basch, professor of 19th century French literature at the Sorbonne

File under: Gustave Kahn First To Knock / Michigan Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Fiction / Poetry

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