Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Ruminator Press, 2001, with new preface; original edition, Addison-Wesley, 1990) does a lot of things at dizzying speed. For one thing, it discusses a lot of literature, particularly Romanian, but also Eastern European in general, and Latin American, with some on North American, too, including from the perspectives of Walt Whitman and William S. Burroughs. There is a lot about Dada, Surrealism and the Beats, about authoritarian society, communist dictatorship and also advertising, technology, propaganda and globalism.
Hopefully, more on this in the future. But in the meantime, one of my favorite lines in this dazzling text is also one of Codrescu's simplest: "Here were books."
This copy signed on March 13, 2002, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That was a real cool time. Anne Waldman was there, too.
I've been co-reading Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space / La poétique de l'espace, translated by Maria Jolas (1994 edition; orginally published in 1958). Right now, it's as if The Poetics of Space is having a conversation with The Disappearance of the Outside -- right down to "the dialectics of inside and outside" (Bachelard, page 84). A nest, a space, a house, a place -- go, dream cats, go!
Today's Rune: Signals.
2 comments:
Outside or at least what the individual considers to be the good part of outside should be brought inside and nested within. Except those winter people they are just to crazy to co-habitate with.
"Here were books." I Like that very much. I should read this to broaden my education.
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