Ted Berrigan's son, David, has all his dad's early music. I (Codrescu, editor) once visited Ted in 1967 at 101 St. Marks' Place in New York City and he played an LP of Kerouac reading. He loved "the music" of Kerouac's phrasing. Years later, Eileen Myles, who'd been Ted's student in Chicago, told me that she took "Dylan 101," Ted'd creative writing class, and that she couldn't want to take "Dylan 2" next semester, but didn't for some reason.
Florina Kostulias has been hot on the trail of Urmuz, the Romanian writer considered by many to be the founder of the absurdist strain of 20th century art and literature, a strain that included most of the avantgardes, including the Dada movement and the Theatre of the Absurd. The search for Urmuz, a figure shrouded in myth and deliberate misdirection, is much like that of Morcol, the "detective of shadows" from Raymond Queneau's novel, "Le vol d'Icare" (The Flight of Icarus, in English by Barbara Wright), with the difference that Ms. Kostulias is searching for a real historical figure, while Morcol chases imaginary characters. Her evolving research has uncovered the writer's death certificate and a series of essays by the great and much-better-known poet and essayist Tudor Arghezi, who knew Urmuz well. She has also uncovered a handwritten unknown manuscript by Urmuz, a discovery akin to finding the Grail at a time when swarms of scholars have been scouring every attic and ashtray in search of Great Unknown Modernism (GUM). We reproduce this document here for the first time in the printed world, along with Ms. Kostulias' note and translation. This translation, she warns us, is a work in progress, so stay tuned for tweaks. We will add the Romanian diacritics when we are satisfied with the entire translation. The text in the original Romanian and in English in Florina Kostulias' translation follows her messages on the most pertinent discoveries relating to the founder of NWLW (a New Way of Looking at the World). Ms. Kostulias' complete updates on her progress can be found in an exchange of letters with the Corpse editor in the Letters section, in chronological order.
Bernadette Mayer is a saint like her namesake: she flies and brings colors into the world. Bill DeNoyelles testify on just how he thinks she does this.
What is Surrealpolitik? Some assumed that the answer had emerged in 2003 when a historian reported a shocking episode. According to the report, anarcho-surrealists set up surrealist torture cells during the Spanish Civil War. French artist Alphonse Laurencic, put on trial after the war by the Fascists, confessed that he had invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture. Fascists were imprisoned in small cells in which everything sloped at weird angles, walls were covered with bizarre colors and geometric forms, and the floor was littered with geometrical blocks. The inmates were forced to watch the eyeball-slicing scene from “Un Chien Andalou.” Finally, the meaning of le surréalisme au pouvoir.
Not quite. The episode, though almost universally reported as fact, was an obvious fraud. Think about it.
Coinciding with his birthday, an exhibition from his “Green Man” series at Poets House shined a rare light on an artist who has charted an independent course.
“Responsibility is to keep the ability to respond.” --Robert Duncan “The Law I Love is Major Mover”
In 1674 Moldavian boyar Nicolae Milescu took residence in Moscow, having been offered a high official position at the Posolski Prikaz, the Tsar’s chancellery charged with foreign affairs. In 1675, Milescu was sent by the Tsar of Russia, Alexei Mikhailovich, as high ambassador on a diplomatic mission to the Khan of China. One of his missions was “to learn at any cost and beyond the shadow of a doubt whether friendly relations and mutual affection are to be established in the future between His Majesty the Tsar of Russia and Kangxi, Great Khan of China.” Milescu was also under orders to gather geographic, demographic and ethnographic facts from all the territories that he was bound to cross.
I shall try to present from a comparative perspective a historical (as well as legendary and literary) motif which has been very widespread in the Middle Ages. The motif in question is that of public theological disputations. These inter-confessional controversies were commonly “staged” according to the following scenario: spokesmen of two or more religions were set to challenge one another in a public theological disputation, often having as an “arbiter” none other than the sovereign or the Pope. I shall present several debates of this type that took place in Western (chapter A), in Eastern (chapter B) and in Central Europe (chapter C). I shall not approach the subject from a properly speaking theological perspective, but rather from a history of religions perspective.
