Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano appear at the Encrucijada shortly after our hero's sexual experience is cut short by bossus interruptus. They are each carrying three books, listed and kind of explained below. Dudes are heavy into the esoteric! This shit is obscure!
Ulises Lima was carrying:
1. Manifeste electrique aux paupieres de jupes (Manifesto for electric eyelids skirts?) by Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jen-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen, et al.
This was a hard one to look up. Not many copies were published, I can find no evidence of a translation. Boo. Michel Bulteau and the rest of the Electric Generation were all inspired heavily by William Burroughs, Lou Reed, and Andy Warhol (see link to the theory of cut ups from previous post). Bulteau was also the front man in a short lived weirdo out rock band called Mahogany Brain
2. Sang de satin (Blood of Satin) by Michel Bulteau
More Bulteau! Only 500 copies printed! Lima is good.
3. Nord d'ete naitre opaque (Born North of Opaque?) by Matthieu Messagier.
Another Electric Generation poet! Equally mysterious and hard to research on the web. This is all I got.
Arturo Belano was carrying:
1. Le parfait criminel by Alain Jouffroy
At least I could find some excerpted writing for this one. And, there is a french wikipedia page.
2. Le pays ou tout est permis by Sophie Podolski
Sophie, at least, has made it to the wiki world. She was a Belgian poet who died very young in 1974 (perhaps the inspiration of the fictitious Laura Damian?). Here is a set of pictures from the Sophie Podoloski Research Center.
3. Cent mille milliards de poemes (A Hundred Thousand Million Poems) by Raymond Queneau
Ah, Queaneau. This guy's more in the canon club. Here's a cool interactive version the Hundred Thousand Million.
Ernesto San Epifanio was carrying:
1. Litty Johnny's Confession by Brian Patten
Ernesto is apparently going through a Liverpool School phase - a British scene that released the hugely popular poetry anthology The Mersey Sound in 1967. The style of their poetry was frank and accessible, and inspired many.
2. Tonight at Noon by Adrian Henri
Henri was a Liverpool poet and also member of the bands Scaffold and the Grimms in the Liverpool scene. Here is text of Tonight at Noon.
3. The Lost Fire Brigade by Spike Hawkins
Hawkins was also entrenched in the Liverpool scene. From an article in The Independent: Spike Hawkins, a veteran of the Liverpool Poets movement best known for his nonsensical "pig poems", remembers the event's more obvious displays of flower power. He recalls "lots of pot-smoking", and gladioli being "gathered from the bins at Covent Garden" and scattered over the stage by waif-like dancing girls.
Hawkins, now in his seventies but still writing (albeit with a lucrative sideline editing Russian propaganda films for the Imperial War Museum), hitched a lift to the Albert Hall with two "hooray Henrys", after fellow poet Pete Brown pitched up, unannounced, at his workplace on the day of the reading. At the time he was "cutting up hardboard" in a shop in Dunstable, so the decision to up sticks wasn't difficult.
"It was a launchpad for the Sixties," he muses. "There were people rushing on to the stage naked, and Jeff Nuttall [the late poet, publisher and jazz trumpeter] was undressing downstairs."
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
Manifesto School
I thought it would be really fun to post excerpts from manifestos of major 20th century art movements. The Visceral Realists, and their predecessors, are avant-garde as outlaw - a force of opposition against the political establishment and the artistic establishment. More to come!
FUTURISM! An Italian art movement that began in the early 20th century. "The Futurist Manifesto," which was published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
Mexico City Syndicate! Here is an excerpt from the manifesto issued by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors in Mexico City, 1922. Originally published as a broadside and translated by Laurence E. Schmeckebier in Modern Mexican Art (U Minnesota Press, 1939).
We are those who seek the overthrow of an old and inhuman system within which you, worker of the soil, produce riches for the overseer and politician, while you starve. Within which you, worker in the city, move the wheels of industries, weave the cloth, and create with your hands the modern comforts enjoyed by the parasites and prostitutes, while your own body is numb with cold. Within which you, Indian soldier, heroically abandon your land and give your life in the eternal hope of liberating your race from the degradations and misery of centuries...
We repudiate the so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic.
We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property.
We proclaim that this being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, the makers of beauty must invest their greates efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people, and our supreme objective in art, which is today an expression for individual pleasure, is to create beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.
DADA! And DADA! Below is an amazing excerpt from the "The Dada Manifesto 1918," first published by Tristan Tzara in his journal Dada based in Zurich.
(posted as reprinted in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars by Briony Fer et al)
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is DADA; a protest with its whole being engaged in destructive action: DADA; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of all logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA… abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA… Freedom: DADA, DADA, DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.
SURREALISM! From Andre Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924):
We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights.
AND MORE:
FLUXUS
SITUATIONISM
CYBORG
GILBERT AND GEORGE
ANTI-NATURALS
And, while not a manifesto, some Beat big bangs:
HOWL by Allen Ginsburg
William S. Burroughs expounding on the theory and practice of tape cutups.
FUTURISM! An Italian art movement that began in the early 20th century. "The Futurist Manifesto," which was published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
Mexico City Syndicate! Here is an excerpt from the manifesto issued by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors in Mexico City, 1922. Originally published as a broadside and translated by Laurence E. Schmeckebier in Modern Mexican Art (U Minnesota Press, 1939).
We are those who seek the overthrow of an old and inhuman system within which you, worker of the soil, produce riches for the overseer and politician, while you starve. Within which you, worker in the city, move the wheels of industries, weave the cloth, and create with your hands the modern comforts enjoyed by the parasites and prostitutes, while your own body is numb with cold. Within which you, Indian soldier, heroically abandon your land and give your life in the eternal hope of liberating your race from the degradations and misery of centuries...
We repudiate the so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic.
We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property.
We proclaim that this being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, the makers of beauty must invest their greates efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people, and our supreme objective in art, which is today an expression for individual pleasure, is to create beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.
DADA! And DADA! Below is an amazing excerpt from the "The Dada Manifesto 1918," first published by Tristan Tzara in his journal Dada based in Zurich.
(posted as reprinted in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars by Briony Fer et al)
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is DADA; a protest with its whole being engaged in destructive action: DADA; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of all logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA… abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA… Freedom: DADA, DADA, DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.
SURREALISM! From Andre Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924):
We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights.
AND MORE:
FLUXUS
SITUATIONISM
CYBORG
GILBERT AND GEORGE
ANTI-NATURALS
And, while not a manifesto, some Beat big bangs:
HOWL by Allen Ginsburg
William S. Burroughs expounding on the theory and practice of tape cutups.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Reference Librarian: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Journal
Why was the Visceral Realist's journal called Lee Harvey Oswald?
Is it blindly idealistic - LHO as a man who lived, killed and died as an outlaw dissenter?
Is it facetious - an ironic gesture of idolatry?
Or is it acknowledging the machine of persona creation that is The Spectacle? LHO was, by some accounts and according to conspiracy theorists, a wide-eyed confused little man made into a monster by the government through faked photographs, fake biography, false evidence, and the convenient counter attack by Jack Ruby.
Or is it a little of all three? How is the reader to interpret the title - do we laugh with the VRs or at them? Or do we raise our fist and say "yeah comrades?"
Is it blindly idealistic - LHO as a man who lived, killed and died as an outlaw dissenter?
Is it facetious - an ironic gesture of idolatry?
Or is it acknowledging the machine of persona creation that is The Spectacle? LHO was, by some accounts and according to conspiracy theorists, a wide-eyed confused little man made into a monster by the government through faked photographs, fake biography, false evidence, and the convenient counter attack by Jack Ruby.
Or is it a little of all three? How is the reader to interpret the title - do we laugh with the VRs or at them? Or do we raise our fist and say "yeah comrades?"
Reference Librarian: Lautreamont's Maldoror
This prose poem comes up repeatedly in our first assignment. Les Chants de Maldoror was published in the 1870s in Paris by Uruguay-born author Comte de Lautreamont (the pseduonym of the mysterious Isidore Ducasse).
It comes up repeatedly because of its seed/spark status in the Surrealist movement.
from the wikipedia:
In 1917, French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of "Les Chants de Maldoror" in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted. In his memoirs Soupault wrote:
"To the light of a candle which was permitted to me, I began the reading. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read the "Chants" again, convinced that I had dreamed... The day after André Breton came to visit me. I gave him the book and asked him to read it. The following day he brought it back, equally enthusiastic as I had been."
The book's first sentences are as follows (imagine you have just opened a strange looking tome in a dark Paris bookseller)
May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, find without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages. For unless he bring to his reading a rigorous logic and mental application at least tough enough to balance his distrust, the deadly issues of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar.
Here is a new translation of the book on my fave press Exact Change.
Here is a translation of a few of the Cantos.
It comes up repeatedly because of its seed/spark status in the Surrealist movement.
from the wikipedia:
In 1917, French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of "Les Chants de Maldoror" in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted. In his memoirs Soupault wrote:
"To the light of a candle which was permitted to me, I began the reading. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read the "Chants" again, convinced that I had dreamed... The day after André Breton came to visit me. I gave him the book and asked him to read it. The following day he brought it back, equally enthusiastic as I had been."
The book's first sentences are as follows (imagine you have just opened a strange looking tome in a dark Paris bookseller)
May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, find without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages. For unless he bring to his reading a rigorous logic and mental application at least tough enough to balance his distrust, the deadly issues of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar.
Here is a new translation of the book on my fave press Exact Change.
Here is a translation of a few of the Cantos.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Salon Van Ness First Communique
Salon Premiere:
Where: Ladies' Fort 1334 S Van Ness
When: Thursday, June 4 19h (meetings will then be weekly on thursday)
Assignment:
I received my copy of The Savage Detectives, opened to the first page, and found that at least our initial protagonist is a student of the law who abandons his studies to join a group of renegade poets called the Visceral Realists.
For Thursday's meeting, please read the introduction to the English edition, and the first 75 pages (up to the "November 21" diary entry).
Also, I found this a helpful backdrop: New Yorker on Bolano http://tinyurl.com/ons8nq
I am making you all Bloggers for this here blog - we can wax on any and all crap that comes up in our readings and discussions, or share supplemental readings with each other.
xoxo, j l s
Where: Ladies' Fort 1334 S Van Ness
When: Thursday, June 4 19h (meetings will then be weekly on thursday)
Assignment:
I received my copy of The Savage Detectives, opened to the first page, and found that at least our initial protagonist is a student of the law who abandons his studies to join a group of renegade poets called the Visceral Realists.
For Thursday's meeting, please read the introduction to the English edition, and the first 75 pages (up to the "November 21" diary entry).
Also, I found this a helpful backdrop: New Yorker on Bolano http://tinyurl.com/ons8nq
I am making you all Bloggers for this here blog - we can wax on any and all crap that comes up in our readings and discussions, or share supplemental readings with each other.
xoxo, j l s
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