from Guy Debord

To Michel Bounan
24 July 1992
Dear Michel:


The climates of the times in which the order of the world is overturned much resemble each other. Yesterday I heard a mediatic[1] announcer rectify us quite gaily about the news that a "third" AIDS virus has not been discovered, fortunately, as one had feared. It was nothing more than the beginning of the mutations!

I thank you for your new prescription and all of your advice. The disappearance of quality in almost all available forms of alcohol -- Russian vodka having been, in the last two or three years, the last one to be lost -- at first appears to leave one with no regrets about limiting oneself to wine:[2] I have been reduced to [drinking] whisky, the taste of which has always been so sad.

Since you have already done so much, perhaps I might ask you to find for me, at either Actualites on the rue Dauphine or at Paralleles on rue Saint-Honore, a copy of issue #15 of the Encyclopedia of Nuisances, which was published in April and attempts to explain itself with respect to me one more time.[3]

I hope that you have already found the parry to your Parisian allergy.

Amicably,
Guy

[1] Translator's note: there is no adequate equivalent in English for mediatique, which not only refers to the media, but to the spectacular, as well.

[2] Translator's note: see letter to Bounan dated 11 June 1992: "Nothing more noxious than rum or cognac; wine doesn't count."

[3] Translator's note: the Encyclopedia of Nuisances -- at first a group that published a journal by that name and, later, a simple publishing house -- was close to Guy Debord between its founding in 1984 and 1986, after which there was a parting of the ways.


(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2009. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)




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