excellent Bruno Schulz site I've posted before. The translations here are better than the published ones.

"My father was inexhaustible in his glorification of that uncanny element, as such was matter.--There is no dead matter--he taught--lifelessness is merely an outward show, behind which unidentified forms of life lie concealed. The range of those forms is endless, and their shades and nuances inexhaustible. The Demiurgus was in possession of valuable and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to these, he called into being a multitude of generations, renewing themselves by their own strength. No one knows whether those recipes will ever be reconstructed. But it matters not, for even should those classical methods of creation prove once and for all inaccessible, certain illegal methods remain, a whole host of heretical and illicit methods."


 

today's YouTube-- Brothers Quay - Street of Crocodiles complete 20 min. stop-motion classic from the stories by Bruno Schulz. Works rather well online.

(photo above is present day town of Drogobych,in the Ukraine--one of these shops is the actual cinammon shop of Schulz's father)




 

Words of Wisdom from Weldon--

"Whitewash

I guess the spirits messed up
this season, but I am not about
to go & call them on it.

So many creatures, totems,
and fetishes --it's like finding
the right search term and running with it.

The Jungle Lords of Copyright,
taking pens, pencils, Starbucks
cups, Ricky's soccer team;

everything, in an attempt to
protect themselves. But they're
ruining North American criticism.

Lose all respect, and then you
too can balance on the edge
between the poem & a hole so deep.

The rising of scales, the Poem
in Action, not to drag it down to
the deplorable condition of "information."

The good isn't bad. It's
strategic. There's some good shit
in here, may it proudly proliferate."

 

farewell Muriel Spark Scottish author of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", "Memento Mori" and many other novels, poetry and a good biography of Mary Shelley...
 

If you can judge a show by its promo postcard, and you can, then Sonny Assu: As Defined Within the Indian Act--starting Apr 22 at the Belkin Satellite 555 Hamilton Vancouver--should be worth seeing.
 

today's YouTube--New Order--The Perfect Kiss--

Jonathan Demme directed this portrait of a great band at their peak playing in real time. Best bits: the hitting of the "frog keys", the seizing of the red cowbell, Gillian looks up...
 

Hilary Mantel, whose "A Place of Greater Safety" is the best fictional version of the French Revolution I've read, on Robespierre--

"The Revolution is not over, any more than history is at an end. Whenever Robespierre was interrupted, something is missing still. Whenever he was silenced, we are listening to the silences. Whatever else he was, he was a man of conviction and a man of principle. We are not now attuned to principle or conviction, but to the trivia of politics and the politics of trivia. This is why we cannot understand the Islamic world, or the conviction of its militants, their rage for purity, their willingness to die. What they have, the heirs to the liberal tradition have let slip away; we're ironical, comfortable, self-absorbed and fatally smug. We think justice has been done; good enough justice, anyway - and we hope that charity will fill the gaps. Robespierre had no holy book, but he had a militant faith, not in a Christian god, but in a good revolutionary god who had made men equal. He did not see his "Supreme Being" as a figure who offered consolation alone, but as an active force for change. Revolutionaries were to enjoy an afterlife; death, he said, was "their safe and precious asylum". His ferocity of intent, his fierce demand for martyrdom, are suddenly familiar to us; he appears to be our contemporary."



 

best thing I've read on the Moussaoui trial--Sad-sack terrorists no threat


"In all the terrorist attacks since 9/11 by people who are in some way linked with al-Qaeda and its various clones and affiliates (apart from those in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are directly linked to foreign occupations), the total fatalities around the world are well under 1,000 people. Less than one person a day worldwide is being killed in so-called Islamist terrorist attacks. More people than that are dying of dog bites.

This is not a global crisis, however much President Bush strives to define it as such. From the start, the “war on terror” has served as a cover for various plans for asserting U.S. military and political hegemony around the world; these plans were on the neoconservatives’ agenda for years before they took control of U.S. foreign and defence policy with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001. It has been one of the longest and most successful hoaxes in history—but the strategies that hide behind it are still doomed to end in failure."

(on the Lower East Side set of "Film")


Samuel Beckett born a hundred years ago today...


"...you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery."


Molloy, Part I


also three years I've been doing this blog!

another YouTube--No Regrets-- Walker Brothers

 

todays YouTube--Altered Images--I Could Be Happy

 

happy birthday Kit Smart


"For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command..."

 

today's YouTube--Robert Wyatt - I'm A Believer from 1974

 

This one's much older, an anti-slavery tract.

 

more Book Covers but splendidly embossed...I wonder what happens in this one?

(thanks S.)

 

via I like (again to the Tunnock's factory!) this gallery of Ronald Searle Book Covers

 

Our rights

Our rights, originally uploaded by Will Bragg.

stop-motion version of the Moomins at YouTube--the Czech version done over into English in the 60's, read of but never before seen...

 

A Dispatch from Reuters

As a younger boyle
in eardrum, in engraving,
he parsed a
hissing pigeon to an
altercation, factored
it into historians
procrustes by way
of Ida Magnify--wholesome latterly
but become history
formerly--attuned,
bandying to whoever'd
wantonly earthwormed
his historic pigeon,
scouring them
with a brittleness Europeanized
by a telegraph's link--
Reuter himself
playful to tractors, newness
by wiretap to Newman.
*
Firebug historians
theorized a firewall to repine;
therefore the peasantry,
specious of Napoleon,
were reuniting
when a rival firebug--
Angora Irish--tendered a
linden whipping
more able to trump theaters,
import fascism,
withold history's monolith or
borrow a frozen frightfulness--
Sirius Randall perpetrated their
presence, assembled
subsystems thenceforth new,
whispered therapy, stooped
Marcus to craven.

Beckoning no other newton
to beefier recurrences,
howlers, accessings of faber,
thereafter partnered,
begrudging a debt as
a thesis in the
midst of its thefts debugs.
*
Linearity's dearness arrogates
such repressive theories--
prints are fretful, spectroscopic.