Surrealism

...sings the golden turnip with the mulatto touch-typist in my pants.

Soft sausages would gladly procreate in the bathwater of your verisimilitude.

Your mucuous membranes glisten with the glow of forty-seven burning violins.

Madame, your implement is admonishing me!

Your dashingly colored toupee twists my right boot into a state of ennui with the speed and dexterity of many lemon meringue-coated conquistadors and informs me that hanle y can be replaced.

heh.

Textually, I love Surrealism: the novels (for instance Nadja by Breton, Paris Peasant by Aragon, Last Nights of Paris by Soupault) are magnificent, plus Eluard's or Peret's poetry, though the manifestoes are generally a bit stodgy and pedantic. And their primary influence Lautreamont is a fascinating, astonishing writer. I guess the good thing about Surrealist literature is that the ad men and Amis-friendly professors haven't left their grubby fingerprints all over it

people for whom "Surrealism" = Rene Magritte = thumbs down.

Antonioni is a genius. "The Passenger" is one of the great films of the 70's. Nowadays one cannot make films in that manner, with the advent of the Age of the Aggro-Philistines upon us.

http://i841.photobucket.com/albums/zz334/tim_othy1/kachur7-21-05-13-1.jpg

What is that? Who did that?

Max Ernst. Forgot the title.

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409848518i/15991338._UY424_SS424_.jpg

moaning about what a completely useless twat Izzard is led me back to this the other day. He was a true artiste who could invoke suicidal despair and giddy hilarity in one sentence. Fucking amazing writer.

Great coincidence to see this - I came across Today I wrote nothing by Danil Kharms in a bookstore a couple weeks ago and was blown away. Hilarious, bizarre. Had never heard of him and got the impression he didn’t have much translated/published in English?

I don't think there is much more to translate, in I Am a Phenomenon ... his collection of dairies, there are a few years missing and it is suggested that the NKVD confiscated some of his dairies and journals after his first arrest, and a bit like the unfortunate writer - they were never seen again. After his second wartime arrest, a friend hastily saved what he could of his archive. Such an oddball with a very haughty and aristocratic demeanour was fucked in that era of the Soviet Union.

23 August 1941 - Kharms was arrested for spreading "libellous and defeatist mood". According to the NKVD report Kharms said: "The USSR lost the war on its first day. Leningrad will be either beleaguered or starved to death. Or it will be bombed to the ground. If I got mobilization request, I would punch a commander in the face, they can shoot me but I will not wear the uniform and will not become a soviet soldier, I don't want to be a scumbag. If someone made me shooting from attics during street fights with the Germans, I wouldn't shoot the Germans, but those (*who would make me shoot)".[2]:18

In order to avoid execution, Kharms simulated insanity; the military tribunal ordered to keep him in the psychiatric ward of the 'Kresty' prison on the severity of the crime. Daniil Kharms died of starvation 2 February, 1942 during the siege of Leningrad. His wife was informed that he was deported to Novosibirsk. [5] Only on 25 July 1960, at the request of Kharms' sister, E.I. Gritsina, Prosecutor General's Office found him not guilty and he was exonerated.

Damn.

Never heard of him before, ordering his stuff as we speak.

A funny thing about him is that he made a living as popular children's writer after his rhythmic Seuss like talent with words was spotted. But he absolutely loathed children and even writes about battering them to death with a "knotty club".

Read "Today I Wrote Nothing" a month or so ago. The story about the old woman is, uh, pretty hard to forget!

Not read that one yet, but am familiar with The Plummeting Old Woman who falls out of her window "out of excessive curiosity".

Yes, should have been more specific, there's a few old women in his stories, I think it's actually called "The Old Woman".

prior to the current intervention this was a godforsaken thread eh?

yeah it's almost surreal how empty it was