Dissecting Page 20

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."