Chirot: Notes re Literature of the No, Appropiation & After Effects/Writing "After": Travel Literature, Poe, Spicer, Yasusada, Plagiarism,Translation

An introductory note:--

These are Part One of some rough notes regarding questions, ideas, examples in which Edgar Allan Poe, whose bi-centenary is this year, plays prominent role. "Playing a role, " indeed, as Poe, son of actor parents, created not only several genresof fiction and the first American literary criticism, but also himself, a character continually essaying to create his own theater (the never-realized project of the journal The Stylus) in which he would be the director, producer, set designer, playwright lead perfromer and critic all rolled into one. It is not just for persons and things lost that Poe carries such a deep sense of "mournful and never ending remembrance;" it is also for those things such as his journal that never appeared. One might even consider an aspect of Poe's works to be that of a mourning for a future perhaps never to exist as well as for those things gone & never to be recovered. Poe's work of mourning--not unlike Charles Olson's work as an "archaeologist of morning"--is an uncovering of that burial which is continually covering al things, and also a never ending remembrance of things on the verge of being consigned to oblivion. The states of suspended animation, the burials, the unearthings in Poe's works point towards the desire for a state between death and dreams, between pasts on the verge of disappearing as well as futures that are on the verge of vanishing even as they prematurely arrive. The works in criticism, in detective fiction, in the elaborate puzzles and hoaxes and preparations for science-fiction adventures leading either to the rushing vortexes found in the ocean-traveling stories or to the soaring exultation of visionary states in "Eureka!" all exhibit a continual state of crisis whose resolution in form is not a closure, but what Poe called "the Effect," towards which al elements of a piece of writing are constructed. In this sense Poe is, as Mallarme was aware, a predecessor of the Symbolists and of Mallarmean thought--itself often concerned with mourning--as expressed so well by the French poet:

To name an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from gradual divination of decrypting (unraveling of a mysterious scroll.) The idea is to suggest the object. It is the perfect use of this mystery which is symbol. An object must be gradually evoked in order to show a state of soul; or else, choose an object and from it elicit a state of soul by means of a series of decodings.


The Effect then--a series of decodings--of puzzles, hoaxes, detective stories, sci-fi discoveries--
and the State of Soul--to be "elicited"--
"the perfect use of this mystery"---
"the gradual divination of decrypting"--
"unraveling of a mysterious scroll"--
"to suggest an object"--

From the Effect to the After Effect--or, an After Effect that engineers in reverse the appropriation of the Effect, the predecessor, as well as engineering after the fact the construction of the Effect, again an engineering in reverse, so that the Future itself is unraveling in reverse and "through the gradual divination of decrypting" becomes part of the Effect of the detective Dupin's ratiocinations in the DEDUCTIVE realm . . . at once a moving forwards and a pulling back--like the famous simultaneous Zoom in and Dolly back camera movements in the Merry-Go-Round scene in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train . . .




Part One

In the period of roughly 1590-1700, in the genre, immensely popular at the time--of "travel literature," there was massive plagiarism going on and in immensely imaginative ways, with a borrowing here, a stolen bit there and everywhere a stitch in time saves nine and voila one has produced yet a new book of wonders, authored by a pseudonym--
in turn translated by the same person under a different name into the "french"--so that it there appears as the work of yet another pseudonym--and then is translated back into English by again the same person, with the "translation" appearing under yet a new name--

(this method is used today by various agencies planting disinformation, among them MEMRI, which furnishes almost the Middle Eastern news for the entire mainstream American media--)


The first great critic in American literary history is Edgar Allan Poe, for whom the questions of plagiarism and appropriation were an obsession. Since Poe himself often filched a bit here and a tidbit there, as well as inventing "classical authors and their quotations,"--one may see the common psychological effect of projection at work--accusing others of what one sees and fears to see and know of in oneself--

Poe was also the past master of hoaxes--furthering confusing the issues when it came to his own works, prompting him to insist al the more loudly and wildly on the crimes of others against the rigors he insisted upon as being necessary for a nascent literature to be taken seriously as having, indeed, its own existence at at all, and one separate from that of the English language--

(this is why he's in WC W's In the American Grain--for his criticism--the original "Tommyhawk Man")

appropriation of course, is also used in detournement, to turn an image against itself by the addition of a caption--which can be accomplished also in lines of poems--
and appropriation simply as a montage or collage--the one building to an ideological statement, the other to a satire perhaps--

or, as in some examples from the visual arts (Sherry Levine, Cindy Sherman, et alia--) one may simply take a photo of a photo or reconstruct a photo and take a photo of that--and so be making a commentary on the original photo itself being an example of an image within a prior system which constructed it--

i think an interesting area is that in which it becomes difficult to discern the distinctions between mimicry and appropriation--

at a certain level, one might say that all writing is a form of appropriation, for in each word that one writes, each writer has in them a sense of their own from which source they are appropriating it in the sense of which first time hearing or seeing of that word they have carried with them in memory--

so that with each word in each writer may be living millions of teeming appropriations--or fewer, depending on the writer--

in another way, so many words are already constructed as things made to be appropriated, carried about daily as the basic materials "to get by in this world"--that without anyone realizing it, they are just things "everyone has on them"--

such is the meaning of "stock phrases" for example or "cliches" and "nostrums"--al this baggage one totes about that one pulls out in an emergency or in a daydream half interrupted--and dishes out blandly--

think on how many things in a day one might write or say really that are just appropriations more or less word for word of something heard or said just a bit earlier in the day--
and one produces them calmly, casually, quite offhand, mind you--as though they are indeed the completely new and original thoughts of one's own--

probably a good deal more than anyone realizes throughout the course of the day is just a continual appropriation of texts from earlier in the day culled from here and there, screen, CD, video, news flash, email, book, overheard conversation, direct conversation--and so and on--al this immense flood of words and phrases with which one is quickly and nimbly making those quick hand outs of platitudes that smooth the operations of negotiating one's passage through the language infested day--

so it is that one begins to wonder--my God!--have i said or thought one original thing all day!
or but been just an appropriatin' fool!
skipping along happily flinging out the posies of phrases picked up on the lawns of others--

ah yes--and to ask of Emily Post--
my dear, when is it appropriate
to appropriate?


to appropriate refuse, the thrown out, is another tradition--(to which i belong)--the "utility of the useless"--the use of the mud for gold a la Baudelaire--alchemies of alleyways--Rimbaud's famous catalog of junk he found of use--and Schwitters picking up used bus tickets in the muddy despairing streets--

an appropriation of what no one wants!--
because in good part, "necessity is the motherfucker of invention"--

this is the appropriation method or style at the other end of the spectrum form that which makes use of the highest of value materials in order to reflect well on the caliber of the poet doing the appropriating--

as one may see, there remains really vast work to be done with the questions involved with appropriation, in the realms simply of what it means in terms of taste, for example--and of the ettiquette of the approproiate use of appropriation--and al the hosts of meanings that may be wrung from each different aspect and its contexts--

its placements within the streams and flows of time--

for each appropriation is it not, creates a new history for the words which it appropriates, reframes them, regalvanizes them--that is, if the appropriator is worth their salt-!

as some indeed simply fall flat--but when it is working the old approrpriation mill is helping to keep alive the endless quantum possibilities of what are the uncertainty principle of words, letters, signs--



In a note regarding the appended glossary at the book's end, William S Burroughs in his Introduction to Junkie (1953) writes: "A final glossary, therefore, may not be made of words whose intentions are fugitive."

One aspect of both translation and appropriation is precisely that what is done with the original text is NOT to copy, but indeed to create meta-narratives of and/or with/for them, and not necessarily parallel ones, either.

This last point, for me at any rate, is important to keep in mind, for in examining the questions of translations and appropriations, one needs to remain aware of the possibilities for these to be used in ways which, while being "camouflaged" perhaps as "artistic," may instead be directed in more sinister directions. As usual, there are a good many more than "two sides to a story," and it is in fact this very potentiality, these many possiblities, and the uncertainty principle in regards to which are being activated--that makes the activity of working with as well as studying such materials a more complex and subtly varieagted one than may at first be supposed.


In the earlier phases, travel literature ranged wildly from rather crude cobblings of roughly smacked together bits and pieces of others' works, with, if the cobbler of the work had some imagination, some "previously unrecorded" and especially thrilling and "New! Astonishing! Marvels Never Before Seen nor Heard Of!" thrown into the mix to add to the sales and also to the ever more hallucinatory visions of the lands on the other side of the Atlantic, the Indian or Pacific Oceans.
(I recently came across an advertisement trumpeting the latest edition of an old classic of the Travel Literature days, one which is made up of a good bit of plagiarism, some invention and some pure nonsense that the Indians had fobbed off on the gullible explorers. The book is still in print as having yet a value as a guidebook to the areas it concerns! )

Lautreamont and Poe made great use of this tradition of license being extended in travel literature and works on such subjects as conchology--for Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror are constructed with vast swathes of pure plagiarism, cheerfully mixed in with le Comte's Baroque treatments of the Gothic tradition from earlier in the same century, and plenty of doses of scientific jargon culled from various dust collecting texts.

(Witness also the opening of Moby Dick, which consists of the etymologies and examples of the names of the whale through time and around the globe, among many many languages and cultures.)

I noted before that there is a relationship--as there is in Moby Dick--between the uses of appropriation and translations, mimicry and copying, which make of writing potentially a form of acting, even of an acting in a theater constructed by the writer and in which the writer becomes both the director and the leading character or characters. It is possible also for the writer to become the audience as well and in turn the critics, who provide reviews, commentaries, blurbs, hatchet jobs and fawning notes of introduction for some favorite of theirs whom they wish to promote in the role of a kind of "private agent." This dispersal of the "writer" through so many roles in turn begins to generate ever more series of meta-writers, meta-dramas, meta-commentaries until one has what is basically the long glorious history of the productions of Shakespeare's Richard the Third and their myriad spinoffs, including Johnny Rotten copying Laurence Olivier's Richard in the film version for his creation of the character and existence as a performer on stage of--Johnny Rotten, who in his turn is ranting and attacking the Queen.

This theatricality of a writing which makes use of appropriations and translations (including invented ones) means that the "author" does not "die" but instead becomes an actor, in which the presence of other voices begins to issue through the throat and the writing of "some one else" to come from the hands. The actor whom is the role that the writer has become, speaks lines which are--whose?--The writer's? the actor's? the role's? And out of these emerges a writing which is a fiction which is at the same time real, or a reality which is fictional, and al the while is performing an activity which is a writing, a gestural, visceral, sonic and visual action writing which may in fact exist "nowhere at all" but as the non-writings of a non-writer who regards thinking and writing as the same, just as imagined writing may exist in a sphere in which it has no need of being "written down," as it enjoys in fact the freedom of it's not existing on the page, but in the "else wheres.".

When Bartleby says "I would prefer not to" and instead stands staring at the blank view through his window of a very close pressed wall of the building opposite--is it into these elsewheres that his writing now is being done?

So it is that a personage like my "El Colonel" and Spicer's Lorca, and Yasusada's Spicer as well as the Yasusada created by the reader out of the accoutrements that are provided for the acting out of the role--so it is that these "non-existent" writers mingle with actual writers who are actually dead, in a theater in which ghosts are lovers and fictional non-ghosts consort with ghosts and the action of the writing is THE LIVING of that being that one is to think of as either "the author" or "the death of the author author." For it is not death, but dispersal across, through, within, and away from writing itself that is the action of the being formerly known as "the author."

Writing has lives of its own in which the writer may find encounters with it, that outside which now and then bumps into him or her, and then, after a bit, takes off again. Or an outside which is found, hidden in plain site/sight/cite all around one, that writing which is continually alive and changing, moving, at once fugitive and glimpsed by, as Robert Smithson calls it, "the artist's glance," which can be a work as real as any object, yet not exist except in the time and the "art of looking" of the artist. For once it becomes an object, then the artist is "signing over" the time and art of looking as a possesion in which someone else "owns the art" and in a subtle or not so subtle way, also "owns the artist."

The real death of the author may then be the sense that exists at present of the author, a being tied down by legal contracts to a name, an identity card number, an address, a telephone, a place and status within such and such community of other authors.

It is this death which a writer may well choose to "prefer not to" be part of, and so find in a "fugitive" existence the ever chaning words and lines of a lexicon which cannot be fixed, nor colonized, nor turned into yet another copyrighted name plated representation of themselves, all ready to charge off to court to protect a name attached to a function which they may at the same time profess to desire the death of.



In this sense, to me, the Yasusada works and Yasusada's idea of writing an "After Spicer" in honor of Spicer's "After Lorca" functions itself as a travel literature example, in that using the construction which is made use of by the hoxed imitations of scholarship of "real texts by real authors," in creating a series of fictional and pseudonymous authors, editors, translators, footnoters, annotators, as well as quotations which are real and fictional or faked, to construct both a fictional author and his fictional works, as well the journey to a distant and exotic land--a Japan which is not Japan but an "After Japan," not a translation or copy, nor actual documents, but an imaginary constructed out of the elements of these . via both actual and fictional Japanese poets, artists, places and events. After all, what is Spicer's Lorca's Spain? Or his Spanish language? Where are they existing in Spicer's text? The traveling with Lorca that Spicer indicates is done in the home of Spicer's, as of two lovers living togetehr for a season. It is in a sense of the continuation of the voyage of Baudelaire through his mistress' hair as a voyage-to-a-text, as well as that voyage of Poe,s in which the white ghostly spaces left by the vanished ghost of the lover-- "After" effects, so that work is written both "After" Lorca literarily and" literally"--after Lorca the lover of the summer in autumn has departed. And indeed, the introductory letter opening the text is written by Lorca--the already dead poet speaking from beyond the grave as his own ghostly After effects become ghost-written by Spicer as his "After Lorca."

For Poe, the "Aftereffects' are "mournful and never ending remembrance" which also tries continually to be reanimated from out of the coffin--into a state between life and death, dream and waking--in which al things possible may occur--an open area of uncertainty--where Poe and Pym takes turns authoring the same text, each one vanishing as the other reappears, back from the supposedly dead, to assert his rightful place in place of the one living and writing in his absence. To battle with the double of oneself--in this suspended state--the tale of "William Wilson"--Rimbaud and his "I is an other"--the confrontation with the hoaxy aspects as well as the documentary and imaginary--of writing and of what is an author--not a who--but a what--as though the author really matters--when as Poe asserts in the "Philosophy of Composition" --one begins with determining what the effect is that one would like to produce.

In other words, an "after effect" which precedes its own creation--just as the "Philosophy of Composition" is written AFTER the composition of "The Raven" and so re-tells the "story" of its creation as an "after-thought" as well as an After-effect----which "reconstructs" an event which actually did not happen, in order to make an argument for the kind of Composition Poe is propounding as the one best suited to create the kind of "great effects on an audience" that the "Raven" had. By demonstrating that he worked backwards, deductively and rationally to produce what are the "irrational" yet also "mechanically engineered" effects of the poem and its Raven repeatedly & (a robot Raven, an "synthetic intelligence"--?) mechanically"quothing""
Nevermore"--Poe writes "after the fact" the non history of a poem in order to prove that his "irrationality" as person does not exist, nor does it in the poem, but al of it, all of it--can be explained!

In the very act of essaying to be the ultra rational one, Poe begins to sound not unlike one of his irrational characters in the process of trying to defend their actions, which came from that other source he depicts so vividly in a different piece, "The Imp of the Perverse."

As a writer, Poe is experiencing and detailing not the "death of the author"--but the cracking, corroding, collapsing, dispersal and disappearance-reappearance dead-alive, living dead,suspended animation state of an author in which the uncertainty principle is at work. so that the author is beginning to have trouble distinguishing between himself and his invented authors, his characters,his texts, his hoaxes and documentations, his published "marginalia" which appear in Newspapers as "real" and which are "made up" as he owned no library to annotate, but only about three books at the time.

And how does Poe exist today? He stil exists as after effects in America as the the creation of a poison pen obituary written by Rufus Griswold! The source for good deal of the myths of Poe is this outright piece of slander. Poe himself became a part of long running tabloid sensationalism, both adding to and altering, shifting, his status as a writer hovering ever suspended among a series of faked images and stories about himself, and his own such creations. In this sense Poe has realized in a peculiar way one aspect of his dream of existing among the living-dead, as he himself continues to exist as this mixture of urban legend, movie versions, illustrations, endless repackagings of his works, endless new theories about them, endless new discoveries not only of original editions themselves but also of the actual facts which he did make use of and which had been thought to be his own hoaxes.

In a sense, to understand a genealogy of "post modern" examples of appropriation, is to find Burroughs' impossible glossary of wrods whose intention are fugitive--for the moment one were to define, control, st boundaries and divide into categories, classifications, the very thing one is observing in order to do this, would continually be breaking it asunder, decomposing it, rearranging it--and so, the place to "begin" is in actuality in the daily newspapers or news in any media--as there one finds the continual dispersal of writings and writers evidenced in the symptoms of language which are registering the seismographic chartings of voyages which never cease traveling, never cease their production of effects and After effects, fall out, radioactive dusts--mutations and permutations--ghosts and ghost written texts--




in the word "After" in Spicer's title is also another meaning, besides the predatory one you write of-- which is that this is written as it were "after the affair is over" in order in a sense to comprehend what Spicer is finding are its "After effects"--

Spicer indicates this in the "Last letter" and also in the final stanza of "Radar" the postscript poem dedicated to marianne moore which "ends" the book and the letter, the final letter to Lorca.

These words of a vanished forever ghost lover are, to me at any rate, heartbreakingly beautiful--almost too much to bear to read--

Here is both the "After" the summer affair of love--and also--the "After effects"--as Spicer depicts them (with on the way, in this last letter, also a discussion of "Poe's mechanical chess player."--Again, an After effect of Poe as I have been discussing these--

From the letter's third paragraph:

"Yet it was there. ("The intimate communion with the ghost of Garcia Lorca" which now "is over.") The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important than my other friends, but now achieving a level of reality by being missing. Today, alone by myself, it is like having lost a pair of eyes and a lover.
"What is real, I suppose will endure. Poe's mechanical chess player was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, and when the man departed, the games it had played were no less beautiful. The analogy is false, of course, but it holds both a promise and a warning for each of us.
"It is October now. Summer is over. Almost every trace of the months of that produced these poems has been obliterated. Only explanations are possible, only regrets.
"Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost, once loved, will never reappear.

Love, Jack

And here is the final stanza of the postscript poem, Radar"
(which, notice, is a palindrome-the same read backwards and forwards--)

"I crawled into bed with sorrow that night
Couldn't touch his fingers. See the splash
Of the water
The noisy movement of the cloud
The push of the humpbacked mountains
Deep at the sand's edge.'



These "After effects" are real for Spicer, as what happened is becoming, now that it is over, and seen in this "After" existence--ever more real--even as it as a ghost lover is gone forever--the missing of it becomes a reality almost too much to bear and yet, as Spicer says--"It will endure."

It is another aspect of Poe's "mournful and never ending remembrance" of the lost loved one, now dead-Just as "The Philosophy of Composition" is an After effect of the poem "The Raven," so this final letter to Lorca is a coming to terms with finding a "philosophy of composition" in order to understand why the now departed ghost lover is becoming more real than it had been while present, in part because it will never reappear again, and how it was that the poems were composed, came to be, without at the time realizing what was happening--not until they had the opportunity to be as they have become, the generators of a time's memory which has turned into a missing reality, never again to return. It is in the After-event, After-effect that the "philosophy of composition" becomes a reality--and the poetry which preceded becomes in turn "more real" than previously the poet had been aware of.


This distance--into which a dead ghost lover is forever departed--never to return--
is a "real and final" distance, the full force of an intimacy never to be again--
and so is the distance which has a life of its own--
out side and away from the poet and the poem--
and to be an outside also for the reader--

In a sense, this kind of distance is what i write of as things which do not want to be appropriated or translated, but to be what they are, distance, never to reappear--never to be possessed--

i n a sense, writing itself, and also a writer, may wish to keep a privacy even within the writing, which will never be found, not by anyone, because the ghost lover it is created with is gone for ever--
or because there are things which ghosts and writers wish to keep to themselves, just as writing itself may have such things which are never found that are living with in it--
as though in fact long gone--never to reappear--

and yet one day one finds--hidden in plain sight/site/cite--
which "neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs"
as Heraclitus says of the One Whose Oracle is at Delphi--



I keep bringing him up, but Poe is the first American writer to consistently use methods, let alone invent quite a number of his own, for creating hybrids of facts, fictions, fakes, hoaxes, "newspaper items," and "detective stories," one of which, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," was written along side the actual tabloid sensation mystery of the murder and disappearance of the body of Mary Rogers, "The Cigar Store Girl." Via his fictional ratiocinating "Dupin, Poe wanted to demonstrate that this method would more effectively, efficiently and correctly solve the crime than the tabloid accounts of the bumbling methods of the then rather haphazard assemblage of beings and techniques that was the new York Police force.

(Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes makes use of this inspiration of Poe's in Sherlock Holmes' always using the London Times as vast treasure trove of textual evidences and clues.)

One of Poe's great dreams is to find the area of suspension between waking and dreaming, living and death--and in this manner be at the blurring of all boundaries--an area i which reality and imagination, fictions and fakes, all are equally vivid and as it were living-dead. Having observed the death of his mother, his brother and his young wife, Poe's desire to as much as possible suspend the last instants of consciousness before its extinction is a "rational"desire and need for something that others deem "irrational." Thus the work of Poe becomes ever more of a series of depictions in which the ratiocination of the writing "detective" and "mathematician" try to hold at bay the incoming flood tides of the Others--the living dead, the ghosts, the hearts beating through floorboards, the journey of Arthur Gordon Pym through a realm all in Black--Black people, birds, soil, letterings carved into black rock--and then white--the arrival finally at the edges of the other side of a printed page from the blackness of letters to its white spaces--a figure of white that arises out of the whiteness of mists and is as white as the whiteness of snow. In effect--a "white out"--the termination of writing as black notations on white pages and the the confrontation of a "white on white" aspect at the edges of what is NOT an erasure--as in Malevich's "White Square on a White Square" which had been preceded by the "Black Square a Black Square."

In this narrative of Pym's, it is also noted that perhaps the reader wil not notice at which point the narrative written by Pym stops and that written by the person who is the editor of the published work begins. The book is supplied with an Appendix which in turn throws doubts on who actually did write the text, and if the editor is telling the truth, or if there is some other aspect involved, and Pym himself has been perhaps the narrator all along.

The making ambiguous and mysterious of a fictional account of journey that is fantastic yet described in the most precise "ship shape" manner and details, is to further emphasize the idea that there can always be as it were "updates" on the status of a text and its "authorship." That is, Poe is demonstrating that even one's own texts can experience such disputes, as to what Poe really wrote, what was written by someone else whom he plagiarized or "borrowed generously from." In effect, the Appendix is implying--there can continually be "news flash" updates on the status and authorship of this text, and basically any other, as al texts participate in this madcap traversal of exchanges and exchange (stock exchange also).

Again, this method gives Poe the chance to "put off" the idea of their being "an ending"--in effect the "true story" has not yet been told, and so in the meantime one will be continually finding "news flashes' which bring one the latest updates on the Poe-Pym voyages and authorships.

In Pym, the authors--both of them or more--are in a sense playing a game of jack in the box with what are the various scenes of internment in the book--the whole tale finds Pym being confined in terribly close quarters, or in a situation of captivity or near extinction. In fact, we do not know as the book begins whether or not Pym actually survived at al to tel this tale, as Mr Poe claims that he at some point is the author who takes up the pen from the vanished Pym in order that his tale "might live on" so to speak.

When Pym shows up in the Appendix, live after, --this suddenly recasts the Narrative as a book which is actually not the book of the authors, either one--but one which is actually not yet written, but exists as it does "so far" in this "half man half horse" state of having the two seamless authors--one of them presumed dead and replaced part way through by a "ghost writer" who has to face the return of the ghost as not a ghost once the text has been "completed," and now lies on the floor, a ball of a "Yarn" (story) being madly unwoven by one of Poe's own "Imps of the Perverse."



In Poe's brief "sketch" written to accompany an illustrated plate, entitled "Morning on the Wissahicon," (a forerunner of Reagan's "New Morning in America" as already a "Mourning on the Wissihicon)--a traveller takes a jaunt down the Wissihicaon and discovers unexpectedly, so close to the metropolis of Philadelphia, a wild and savage remnant of an America already thought to be long past, and but the figments and shards of a former dream. He sees an Indian in a wild overgrowth of unspoiled natural landscape, and as he drifts by the dramatic scene, there even appears a a magnificent and authentic American deer--a sort of proto--"Deer Hunter" moment in which the marvelling traveler is confirmed in his belief that at last he has found the old, the real America, of the wilderness and "savages," and the untamed wild life and untrimmed flora of his "native land."
Yet, the traveller later learns, all of this has been an elaborate and beautifully staged simulacra, for a wealthy Englishman has purchased the former Colonial landscape, and populated it with a servant dressed and made up as an Indian, let the flora go carelessly to seed, and provide the whole as a topping to the cake, a domesticated deer who is able to pose as a wild one for the passersby of a Sunday. Already a "quotation" of what had been a stock vision of the "old America" in all its "savage splendour" has replaced the original with a copy which "outshines" as it were not only the long vanished original, but has also made, on is certain, the old real estate greatly increase in value by looking so like what it had replaced in terms of what had been thought to be along lost memory with a Brand new and vivid recreation posing as indeed "the reality of today."

Poe's Englishman thus has accomplished already the creating of an "ideal language and landscape" made entirely of quotations, and for Poe, the "mourning" in this "morning" is that the morning is in a sense not yet over with and it has already been replaced by a quotation of itself, which will "outlive" the former and so in a sense give cause, if one recalls it at all, a "mourning" for the "morning on the Wissihicon which now no longer exists except as indeed an ideal language and landscape "in quotation."

The further "mourning" is that the English, who had been the former and for a while defeated Colonial Power, have now wrested away what had been known of as an "American original" and turned it into an English owned and recolonized landscape preserved as a copy of the vanished original.

At the time that Poe began writing, ruins were all the rage, due in good part to Gothic and Romantic literature from Europe--the kind of literature and ruins Benjamin was later to write his now famous unpublished thesis on. Americans were in a state of anxiety, as their country seemingly had produced no "real ruins." Poe--who had attended school five years abroad in Scotland--had seen "real ruins" and as he replied to one critic who accused him of writing in the manner of the Germans of the time--"Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul." Having witnessed the decomposition and descent into ruins via disease of his dying mother, dying older brother and then dying wife, Poe realized that the the lack of "real ruins" are, like Emerson's Nature--"the blank and ruin we see in Nature is within our eye"--is not a lack at all but instead the blindness to what is in front of one--the decomposition and decay at the core of being, no matter how "new."

In his "Philosophy of Composition," Poe constructs an impeccably rational method by which he has gone about composing his poem "The Raven." No "romantic ruins" or frenzy inspired him, no "inspiration," but, instead, a kind of calculating feat of engineering brought to bear on the decomposition of the very thing that has constructed the poem--the rational, the logical, the "constructive" mind. The use of quotation passes from humans to a bird--"quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'" The bird may even be a copy of a bird, a mechanical bird whose cries are repeated by virtue of a timing mechanism triggered by the last lines of the verse preceding its next outburst. Or they may indeed be those of a "real bird," "quoting" "nevermore," a phrase which plunges the student in the poem into one of those ever deepening and decomposing morasses of the soul which Poe depicts also in the guise of decomposing bodies and languages also, which devolve into black birds' cries (perhaps "quothing the Raven" itself--??!!) as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Poe, with his rationally constructed tales in which decomposition and irrationality begin to "take over" and Burroughs with his fugitive languages whose words change their meanings frequently not only in time--from week to week or day to day if need be-- but also vary from place to place along the trail of the outlaw addict, evidence a yearning for a language which will elude the colonization process of appropriation and quotation. For Dubuffet, the "way out" of this nightmare in the "asphyxiating culture" of the art world was Art Brut as he originally found it and conceived of it--that is, Dubuffet recognized its existence there, well having the honesty himself as an artist to know that he himself might learn from these "Raw" artists while not being one himself.

That is, not that there will be an "authorial self" who is "original" but that there may exist "languages" and realms of" communications" in and among and through which the possibility of a continually "living" yet "invisible" writing is "on the move," while behind it are the deposits of its shed skins, its discarded, outdated notations, to be picked up on as "news" and "clues" so as to distract and confuse those would-be appropriators and translators of a writing which does not want to be read, and so creates "fakes" of its non-self in order to provide "cover" for its ever elusive voyages, fictions to amuse itself as it observes the futile hunters continually be led round and round in circles, deciphering non-signs as signs and elaborate scrawls as "lucid notations" of a "lost language" or of a "new language" which they alone will become the possessors of the secrets of, the sole appropriators and translators of, the alpha and omega of a literature which now is thought to "belong to history and civilization" and which instead is simply an empty wooden horse, a decoy duck, while somewhere, elsewhere, the writing leads lives of its own.



This vision of a language which is continually in movement, continually changing, concealing itself, reappearing, being thrown overboard, or bobbing about as the carved coffin bearing the absent Queequeg's script and the sole survivor and author to be of the tale of the late Pequod--is itself from a period in which the American language was in flux, not yet standardized and fixed into the defined and set stone of Webster's. A chaos in spelling, punctuation and grammar was perfectly acceptable, as were the wildly varying degrees of abilities of readers to decipher the riot of signs and symbols running amok all around them, and so was a sense of writing as something alive and and unfixed, nomadic and tending, like Art Brut and the addict's fugitive Jargons, towards an anarchy and "Civil Disobedience" which have become increasingly tamed, toned down and timid.

For example, consider that today, a work of appropriation in a conceptual sense is proffered as that of "unoriginality, copying" and the "author" thus no longer "exists" except as a functionary, a filer of data, a sorter of files. This is precisely the work which Bartleby is assigned to, and which he one day simply decides that he would "prefer not to" do anymore.

Bartleby's act of Disobedience he pays for by being incarcerated in the tombs, there to die, refusing all the while to acept anything offered out of a sense of obligation by the employer who had put him there in the first place, as a last resort against homelessness.

In a peculiar way, may one not say that Bartleby is a kind of "political prisoner," (civil disobediance since 9/11 carrying much heavier potential penalties) in the sense that he will no longer carry out the contemporary (today's) idea of what it means to be an author-cum-death-of-the-
author? Instead, he would "prefer not to" be a writer who writes as the death of the author as it exists in the conceptual formulation of copyist and filer, even if rejecting this method of writing-as-the-death-of-the-author means the loss of his freedom, and following that, of his life.

In short, Bartleby would "prefer not to" BE a "death-of-the-author-author" but instead simply to die.

Chirot: Bolano, Cinema of Disappearance/US Extreme Experimental poetry & " Downstairs from her glittering Chilean salon, there was a torture chamber"

CHIROT--ROBERTO BOLANO PARIS 2002--CINEMA OF CATHARSIS

THE "NEW CHILEAN POETRY" AND THE NEW EXTREME EXPERIMENTAL AMERICAN POETRY


CHIROT--FOR THE DISAPPEAREDS



CHIROT--FOR THE DISAPPEAREDS

THE CINEMA OF DISAPPEARANCE--THE POETICS OF APPEARANCES


JET--US BACKED CHILE COUP--9/11/73

THE "PURIFICATION OF DISEASED CONTENTS" VIA "THE CLEANSING OF FORM"


ROBERTO BOLANO--NAZI LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS--US EDITION
ACTUAL FICTIONS--FICTIONAL ACTUALITIES



FOTO FROM LOCAL TV NEWS--CHIROT--MILWAUKEE 2008

THE RECURRENCE OF SKY WRITING--THE REPETITION OF IMAGES--9/11/73--9/11-2001


US BACKED PINOCHET COUP--9/11/73

(EXCERPTS FROM AN ONGOING SERIES OF ESSAYS-- FOLLOWED BY NEWSPAPER ARTICLE RE THE FICTIONAL AND ACTUAL POETRY SALON/TORTURE CHAMBER OF BOLANO'S BY NIGHT IN CHILE AND THE PROPOSED MUSEUM OF FORMER RESIDENCE OF CHILEAN WRITER AND HER AMERICAN AGENT HUSBAND)

In Bolano's Distant Star and By Night in Chile, a nation's Poetry is presented as another way of creating an accommodation with the Fascist State. The concept that via Form one may separate writing from the State in such a society makes possible the co-existence of torture, secret prisons, disappearances, mass murders, censorships and the support of similar regimes routine.

To state the obvious and "critique" the situation is to be exposed as a "nonbeliever" in the Forms by which the "separations" in Form are used to in effect make "Invisible" the "separations" in actuality. In order to maintain the "equivalences" which conceal that "some are more equal than others," it is necessary to maintain "separations" which literally Wall in or out anything that would "dirty" the appearances which are allowed to be Visible.

In Distant Star, the aviator-poet Carlos Weider creates the "New Chilean Poetry" as a series of "stages" of "development," leading from Sky Writing to the private exhibition of a room whose walls and ceiling are covered by the arrangement of hundreds of Polaroids of tortured, mutilated bodies set against eerily similar backgrounds, arranged in grotesque mannequin poses,with some of the victims seeming to be, against all odds, still barely living. Among these the novella's narrator reports that there are a great number of the students and young poets who have recently disappeared from their usual haunts.

Weider's Atrocity Exhibition proves too extreme for even the Pinochet military officers to stomach, and Weider is forced to go "underground," his work consigned to appearing in the clandestine publications of Bolanos book of Borgesian "Imaginary Beings," "Nazi Literatures of the Americas." (Distant Star is an enlargement of the final "chapter" in this recently translated volume.)

Weider's "problem" is that he "states the obvious" in presenting the condoned tortures, disappearances, sky writings of Opus Dei slogans, plagiarized poetry presented as "original," all of which "make Visible" as a " triumphal" State of the Art Art of the State all those things which the State which to keep "disappeared' into the realms of the "Secret" and the "Invisibility" which are its foundations.

These Foundations which Poetry is to separate itself from though declaiming and dancing on the floors which are the ceilings of the Foundation, create the truly grisly final scenes in By Night in Chile, in which Emily Dickinson's idea that "Nature is a Haunted House, and Art a House which tries to be Haunted," is put severely to the test.

In By Night in Chile, the Opus Dei slogans of Weider's sky written "New Chilean Poetry" forced to go "underground," are "recalled" in the Opus Dei narrator's depictions of that "underground" as the secret Foundations of Official Chilean Poetry.


CONDOR HOTEL PAPER


FROM OPERATION CONDOR ARCHIVES


Operation CONDOR--CLANDESTINE JOURNAL

The Extreme Experimental aspects of Weider's "New Chilean Poetry" as the Secret Foundations of the officially sanctioned "avant-gardes" of Chilean Poetry in By Night in Chile are connected with the aid of an American married to a Chilean writer in whose house the "Hauntings" of Emily Dickinson's House take on another aspect entirely.

This American figure now works no longer for others and indirectly for the US, but directly for the US itself, and so 9/11 in Chile repeated as 9/11 in the US, presents scenes similar to those in Bolano's Chile-set works. Today, the "official" "avant" and "mainstream" American Poetry repeat the "separation" of the Literary Salon floor which is the ceiling of the "New Extreme Experimental American Poetry."

Writing of the protests against torture and the "Dirty War" in Algeria, Simone de Beauvoir noted that until one understands that torture, "the excesses of the Army," the violent enforcement of Occupations are not "separate" problems "unique to the current regime," but are instead the routine functioning of the entire system of that society, one is not capable of effecting any "change." The claims to "exceptionalisms" and "Formal separations," produce not a "distance from" the Foundations secreted away in the ground, but instead lead only to an ever accelerating increase in violence, Walls of separations, prisons, tortures, attacks,
and their accompaniments in censorships, bannings, blacklistings, surveillance, disinformation, propaganda and the Occupations aboard reflected in the increased force required to make the "Homeland Secure."

"The New Extreme Experimental American poetry" is my own "book of Imaginary beings"
in which the original Military and Security aspects of the term "avant-garde" are
rejoined with their Artistic and Poetic "separations." In the first avant-gardes of the 20th Century, this direct connection was hailed vociferously and enacted violently in "War, the world's hygiene" by the Italian futurists and attacked vociferously and violently by Dada, born of an anti-War fervor which extended to an anti-Art of a NO to the lies of an entire system capable of creating War.

A sign of the entropy of today's separations from the pro and anti War positions of Italian Futurism and Dada can be seen in the Formal and Aesthetic treatments of the manifestos of Marinetti and Tzara, the major PR specialists of the movements. As in effect Propagandists, it is a "sign of the times" that they are elevated to Canonical status at the expense of the great many other artists and aspects of both movements. In this way, separation enables the Aesthetic to be removed from the political and militant aspects which are at the heart of Italian Futurism and Dada.
This separation also enables the "exceptionalism" of Texts over that of the visual and aural aspects except as they are registered in "Formal Terms" reducible to "textualization." (Rather than the more complex and "dirty" "contextualization" One of the "advantages" of textualizing being that is a way of presenting, literally, a much "cleaner appearance on the page," than the "dirtiness" of the visuality and aural "Noise" which Italian Futurism and Dada worked with.)

In the "clean, Formal" textual "avants" today, one finds a similar "exceptionalism" in which "dirt" and "noise" need to be removed for the maintenance of smooth surfaces in which no "cracks" or "faults" are allowed to impede the steady rolling of that "progress" advertised by the PR of safely canonized "avant-gardes."

In order to maintain this "liberatory" canonicty, though, it is necessary to ignore events going on in which the removal of "dangerous texts," "dangerous thinkers," and "dangerous art" are becoming so routine as to be "almost unnoticed." In fact, just this year the distribution of an entire press--Pluto Press, one of the leading publishers in the English language of texts by a large number of the world's leading contemporary philosophers, economists, Leftist and Anarchist thinkers, Middle Eastern scholars, historians,theorists----has been stopped in the USA. Art exhibitions, theatrical and musical events have been closed down, Professors and teachers and students forced out of their institutions, and all of it given very little notice.

These "disappearances" are ignored in the major mainstream media, as it far more "exciting" to raise the fear levels by the focus on the disappearances of a very few almost all Caucasian girls and young women. This new form of "terrorism" is examined with a barely contained voyeurism in which the victims are put on display in a hysteria-amped form of "runway" show turned into "runaway" amplifications of the most trivial details, fueling endless speculations in order to raise the value" of the ratings.

The creation of "exceptional" cases reinforces the sense of "exceptional dangers" which lie everywhere in wait. The underlying appeal is to ever more vigilance, ever more fear, and ever more hatred of the "terrorists" who "stalk the streets and chat rooms." To underline the "terror" of the criminals who walk among us, an endless stream of fictional and "real life" prison shows creates the voyeurism of making of each viewer an eye of the panopticon of Security and Surveillance. Close-up examination of criminals, complete with interviews and case histories, becomes a form of training for the country with the world's largest prison population.

At the same time, the State and Military and Private Contractors forbid with increasing interference and force the depiction of any scenes of the violence and abductions, rapes, horrors of War.


The proliferation of the voyeurisms at home, in which the public may become the spectator of each stage of the hunting down, capture, interrogation and prison existences of ever more persons, is a fertile training ground for the revival of the WW2 programs for Homeland Surveillance by "ordinary citizens" and trained firemen, police officers and security guards in the "detection" of "suspicious persons" who may just turn out to be "terrorists in a sleep cell," or the quiet planner of the next 9/11. These programs are beginning to be installed in various cities, with an eye how better too organize and train them. Soon enough "citizens security" will be turning in all manner of persons who have incurred their dislike, just as bounty hunters in Afghanistan turned in their personal "enemies" to the Americans as "enemy combattants," "Al Queda members" and "terrorists."

Soldiers and Intelligence officers have reported using effectively methods for capturing "suspicious Iraqis" that they have learned from various fictional TV shows watched avidly by the Occupying Forces in their air conditioned quarters.

This blurring of distinctions between the fictional and the "real"--pushed to even further linguistic extremes by the new Tru network, which proclaims itself to be "Not Reality. Actuality"--helps to generate the possibility of ever more forgeries being used in order to create wars, as was done by suing the "Italian letter" and "information" of "Curveball" to invade Iraq.

As the "Creation of Reality" so beloved by Karl Rove supercedes the "reporting of reality," the Invisibilities of things NOT THERE becomes far more of a threat than the Visiblity of THINGS WHICH ARE THERE.

And at the same time, the Visibility of things "seen as threats," needs to be physically disappeared, as with Pluto Press.

The Non-WMDs of Iraq, the Non found Nuclear Program of Iran, all these are causes for War, yet once War is in ful swing, these places with their events, deaths, tortures, War Crimes, become forbidden to be shown, vanish, disappear into those Invisiblities on the other side of Walls Virtual and Concrete.

On his recent International Travels, Senator Obama made two great scenes of appearing at examples of Walls. One was his prolonged appearance at the Wailing Wall, and the other his speech in Berlin, in which he spoke vividly of the no longer existing, invisible Berlin Wall and its Fall as a sign of the other walls to come down around the world.

Since the United States and Israel are the two major Wall builders of the present, the Wailing Wall is shown to be an exception, and the now-gone Berlin Wall is "raised" as an example of the "bad Walls" which need to be removed, so that "good Walls" may remain standing.

While offering a rhetoric of Unity without Walls, the Senator also emphasized the message of exceptionalisms.

By maintaining exceptions while propounding Unity, one is able to "justify" how it is that "some are more equal than others," and some may be "above the laws" which are supposed to be "common to all."

The only way to maintain these exceptions is by a forceful separation both physically and in what is allowed as language and images to present the Visible at the expense of the Invisible, the Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite which is the Foundation of the House in which on one floor some dance and declaim poetry, while just below, others are tortured, forced to speak in what Dmitry Tsevtkov, the Russian artist, states as "Language is a fascism, not because it censors, but because it forces to speak."

In a similar way, media surveillance and voyeurism make possible a forcing to speak, to be seen, as a form of "infotainment" in which the citizenry is not only a spectator, but has the possibility of becoming an "agent" capable of "reporting suspicious persons," who may disappear from view entirely, or become hyper-visible in the ongoing spectacle.

In terms of language, the "forcing to speak" begins with the scanning of texts for "suspicious words" and "suspicious Forms." In effect, what is required is a conformity to a narrow range of accepted and approved standards, and beyond that, if none of the "flag words" or "Forms" have appeared, anything is allowed to be presented. In effect, a continual weeding out of words, ideas, forms, is taking place, so that an increase in conformity produces a "safety in numbers." The "growth" of "movements and groups, the increase in the proliferation and acceptance of their codes and signs, indicates indeed that these are indeed "safe," and not only that, "good for one." The coupling of the ethical to the aesthetic produces in turn a kind of "ethnic cleansing" of ideas, forms, words, so that "exceptionalisms" may become in fact "hegemonic." A narrow range of ideas, words, Forms, may become in this way perceived as very "open," simply because "the competition" has been entirely or nearly, removed.

In Bolano's Distant Star and By Night in Chile, what is important is that the darker sides of these actions and terms becomes "seperated" from the Public Face of Power and Poetry. This results, ironically, in the Military Fascists' banishing of the "too extreme" Carlos Weider, the most fervent in every respect of the "New Chilean Poets," who is also, as an aviator, a National hero. What is demanded is not the plagiarized, Aerial and Photographic expression of a "New Actuality," but on the contrary, the quiet, Institutional figure of the well respected critic-Priest, a combination of the Sacred and the Secular whose union is found in the criticism which perpetuates the National Poetic Language.

As a hearer of Confessions, this figure cannot reveal any secrets to which he becomes a party, which includes the knowledge "too late," of those other confessions being obtained by torture.

It is this figure whose Blessing and assistance is needed by the Generals in order to preserve an appearance of "civility and civilization," and the orderly progression of Chilean Poetry into its Future.

In the US today, the figure of Institutional Poets fits the role of Bolano's Priest-Critic, producing the sense of an "avant" progressive American poetry which at the same time presents no obstacle to the State, and underscores the continuing role of the US as "Number One" in the production of "avants" whose "resistance" is "recognized" and "applauded" by the Institutions which at the same time are disappearing various individuals, texts, art exhibits, film screenings, musical events and entire Presses and methods of thinking and creating deemed "insupportable," by the very persons in charge of insupportable tortures, Occupations, mass murders, collective punishments and the steady flow of ever more refugees, prisoners, starvations, drugs and diseases.


ROBERTO BOLANO--NAZI LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS GERMAN EDITION



OPERATION CONDOR


• Posted on Sunday, August 3, 2008
Downstairs from her glittering Chilean salon, there was a torture chamber
More on this Story
• Story | Chile faces its dark history by tracking down torture centers
• Story | Chile proposes turning torture house into museum

Helen Hughes / MCT


Writer Pia Barros tells about the literary meetings in the home of U.S. citizen Michael Townley and his Chilean wife Mariana Callejas who was indicted in the death by car bombing of General Carlos Prats and Mrs. Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974. | View larger image
By Jack Chang | McClatchy Newspapers


SANTIAGO, Chile — During the darkest years of this country's military dictatorship, Mariana Callejas was an up-and-coming writer and the hostess of the era's most glamorous literary salon.
Chile's leading authors trekked up to Callejas' hillside mansion every Thursday night to talk literature, have a few drinks and sometimes dance until the next morning. The salon offered a respite from the fear and violence of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's Chile, in which nearly 3,200 dissidents died or disappeared at the hands of government agents.
Writer Carlos Iturra, who attended the meetings, said in an e-mail that he'd always remember those nights for "the good writers who were formed there" amid the "dances, drinks, laughs and debates."
Horror lay just below the glittering surface, however, as it often did during the 1973-90 military dictatorship.
Callejas was more than just a writer; she was an agent of the DINA, Chile's dreaded National Intelligence Directorate. Her then-husband, U.S. citizen Michael Townley, one of the U.S.-backed Pinochet regime's chief assassins, later was convicted of setting off the 1976 car bomb that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington.
As the literati danced and debated upstairs, Chilean intelligence officers were downstairs torturing dissidents and manufacturing the toxic nerve agent sarin in a secret laboratory.
That hidden history was exposed June 30 when a Chilean judge sentenced Callejas to two 10-year prison sentences for her role in one of Townley's most notorious crimes, a 1974 car bomb attack that killed former Chilean army chief Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife, Sophie Cuthbert, in Argentina. The same judge sentenced Chile's former intelligence chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, to two life sentences for masterminding the attack.
That landmark sentence, the harshest ever meted out to former officials of the Pinochet regime, has spurred writers in Chile to recall the surreal history of the era and Callejas' famous Thursday soirees.
"The story of Mariana Callejas is a novel, or at least a long story," said Enrique Lafourcade, one of Chile's best-known writers and a frequent guest at the salons, which ran from 1974 to 1978. Like the other writers, Lafourcade said he knew nothing about Callejas' secret life.
"Mariana was involved in many things," he said. "She wanted to help writers, but she was also involved in the anti-communist fight because of her love for Michael."
Callejas and Townley eventually divorced.
She's out on bail while she appeals her conviction.
She testified to court officials that she'd played no part in the Prats and Cuthbert murders. Townley has said, however, that Callejas joined him on the mission and even tried unsuccessfully to detonate the radio-controlled explosives that killed the couple.
Under U.S. pressure, the Pinochet regime expelled Townley to the United States in 1978. He served five years in prison for the Letelier murders, participated in a witness protection program and recently was released, said journalist John Dinges, who's written extensively about the history of the Pinochet regime.
"I definitely think Callejas was excited by all this, and it was a big adventure for her," Dinges said. "She was entirely without scruples. She didn't seem to do it for ideological reasons."
Callejas appears to have drawn inspiration from her dark history for her 1981 short story collection, "The Long Night," which is filled with tales of assassination missions, political prisoners languishing in jails and a bomb attack that bears a striking resemblance to the Prats murder.
In an interview last month with the Chilean magazine Ercilla, Callejas remembered those years as "marvelous, intense, a lot of passion for literature," but she refused to comment on the charges against her. She continued to write well after her marriage with Townley ended, and she published a book of short stories last year.
"Although for years, people have woven many myths about the supposed sinister aspect of the salon and the house, the myths come from those who know neither one nor the other," Callejas said to Ercilla. "Worse still, they don't know anything about me."
Chilean writer Pia Barros, however, said that before one salon meeting she bumped into evidence that something more than short stories was being created at the Callejas mansion.
Walking up to the house one night, Barros said, she mistakenly opened an outside door and found a hidden room filled with cots, laboratory equipment and camouflage fabric.
"I went up to the salon and didn't say a word," Barros said. "We left after half an hour and we never went back. We also never told anybody what we had seen."
Callejas' salon has lived on in Chilean literature. Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano ended his celebrated novel "By Night in Chile" with an account of the salon and the story of Callejas and Townley.

Bolano imagined the Callejas character, years later, wandering around the empty mansion, shunned by her friends and abandoned by her American husband.
"The house already didn't seem the same: All its splendor, a nocturnal and unpunished splendor, had disappeared," Bolano wrote. "Now there was only a house that was too big."
ON THE WEB
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Chile faces its dark history by tracking down torture centers
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McClatchy Newspapers 2008
•

Art Brut manipulated by Ideologies: The Prinzhorn/Heidelberg Collection in the NS (National Socialist/Nazi) Era

Hans Prinzhorn • The Collection in the NS Era
The Heidelberg Collection in the NS Era


The National Socialists were not the first to use the artistic works of hospital patients as a vehicle for their ideologies. Already in the early Twenties the Hamburg psychiatrist and clinic director Professor Wilhelm Weygandt collected "the art of the insane" for use as defamatory evidence. This was the period after the lost war, in which people planned the annihilation of psychiatric patients in their minds, for they were regarded as "mentally dead" and thus as useless "empty human shells" (Binding/Hoche). Contrary to Hans Prinzhorn's courageous step of attributing not only aesthetic but also existential verity to such works and their authors, Weygandt interpreted everything that was unaccustomed, confused or deformed in these pictures as signs of hopeless "insanity". And he collected this "art of the insane" with the purpose of declaring the artists of the avant-garde -- the futurists, expressionists, Dadaists and members of the Bauhaus -- as degenerate, demented or schizophrenic. His proof for this was their outward resemblance. Astonishingly, none of his colleagues contradicted him.
After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, this system of comparing pictures so as to cast the avant-garde in a pathological light was used not only in publications, but also exhibitions: the first occasion, according to Christian Zuschlag, was in Erlangen, 1933, when drawings by children and the mentally ill were hung next to selected modern works from the Mannheimer Kunsthalle ("Mannheim's Chamber of Horrors"). Similarly, after the opening of the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich, 1937, plans were made to heighten the propaganda effect at the future stages of the touring exhibition by making such pathologising comparisons.
The director of the Heidelberg Psychiatric Department, Karl Wilmanns, who had lent his categorical support to the collection, was discharged in 1933, not least because he had underlined the psychogenic origin of Hitler's temporary blindness during the First World War. His successor, Carl Schneider, played a key part in the Action T 4 as senior researcher. The action was responsible for the systematic extermination of the patients who had been stamped as "incurable". He soon recognised the practical side of the Collection, and in 1938 complied with the request of the Central Reich Propaganda Office for loans for the "Degenerate Art" exhibition. The concept that Weygandt had devise - without any objection from his colleagues - now received the official seal of approval from art politics. The aim was to place bothersome artists in the same mental framework that was being set up for euthanasia, and in that way to "dispose" of them.
What criteria were used for chosing the pictures from Heidelberg? Schneider and the former Austrian law student and SA man, Hartmut Pistauer, who was an expert and the temporary director of the vilifying exhibition, had already agreed in autumn 1937 on a selection of pictures that related in either form or content to pictures by modern artists. These allowed them to prove - empirically, as it were - the madness of the artists. According to the visual rhetoric of the newly printed "Exhibition Guide", the modern artists were "mentally ill" or degenerate; their works were compared with four from the Heidelberg Collection, and made to appear equally "crazy" - if not even "crazier" and even more "inept".
It is virtually impossible now to reconstruct the actual hanging of the "insane" and "degenerate" artworks, despite the lively response of the press at the time. Likewise the actual exhibits are largely unknown. All we know are the details of a preliminary selection that was sent to Berlin, but which was not required there and soon after returned (along with a number of folders of work from the Psychiatric Hospital in Munich), accompanied by a partial list of returns dating from June 1938. The seventy or so works that were returned show that evidently the main intention was to contrast the "insane" with the modern artists and demonstrate their superior "ability". Thus for instance the numerous seascapes by Clemens von Oertzen ("Orth"), with their strong lines done in rich watercolours, and the ambitious oil paintings of Else Blankenhorn were planned as counter-examples to the "barbaric" techniques of the modern movement. The pious "Crucifixion in the Park" by Franz Bühler ("Pohl") was presumably meant to contrast with the blasphemies of the Expressionists (such as Max Beckmann's "Descent from the Cross" in his portfolio "Faces" from 1919). Much the same applies to the miniatures of Hermann Mebes, who produced a fine medley of symbols with his brush strokes. The pencil drawing Inv. No. 244 from a series of wire-like, tangled linear forms may have been intended to contrast with Paul Klee's "Zwitschermaschine" [Chirping Machine].
A great variety of portraits were chosen to damn their "degenerate" counterparts. In some cases they accord with the academic canon, in others they are rendered simplistically, as in Else Blankenhorn's somewhat expressionist portrait of a woman. At least 17 works were taken from the oeuvre of the former draughtsman Joseph Schneller ("Sell"), whose precision works could be "enlisted" for many uses. These included several drawings from what he termed his "sadistic life work", as well as collages, landscapes, townscapes and architectural views. The rich assortment chosen from Schneller's works indicates, incidentally, that the disparaging intentions transformed unexpectedly into an appreciation of the works. Also included in the preliminary selection were works by the wood carver Karl Grenzel ("Brendel") and the architect and painter Paul Goesch, three of whose pictures were confiscated shortly beforehand at the Mannheimer Kunsthalle in 1937.
While numerous artists were fleeing abroad, the "Degenerate Art" exhibition enjoyed a successful tour around the Reich. Only in recent years have the twelve stages of the exhibition been researched and documented: Berlin, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Salzburg, Hamburg, Stettin, Weimar, Vienna, Frankfurt/Main, Chemnitz, Waldenburg, Halle. The last was April 1941. By and large the concept of the exhibition met with great approval from the populace, for it touched on traditional fears of modern art. The exhibition "concentrated", as Walter Grasskamp writes, those "fears and reservations which have long since characterised the reaction of the middle classes to modern art - if in a more civil but by no means more conciliatory manner. These reactions have remained alive ... because anxieties about modern art were not a specific syndrome of National Socialism, but simply acted then as a spectacular parade ground for its propaganda."
In a talk by Carl Schneider requested for the Düsseldorf stage of the tour in 1937, on the occasion of its first anniversary, the psychiatrist attempted to give the reasons behind the project. In the final analysis, his rambling expositions boiled down to the demand for the annihilation of all that is compulsive and uncontrollable. This is already made quite clear by the somewhat subtle violence of his psychiatric approach. The doctor attributed, for instance, the "successful cure" of a "schizophrenic artist" who had "already produced pathological works" to the following measures: "We (did) the opposite to what ... Lombroso, Prinzhorn and others had done. Instead of saving the woman's morbid works we destroyed them, and guided her while she went about her normal, self-allotted tasks."
Schneider bases the "biological" kinship between "degenerate" artists and "madmen" on the notion that only a person who is biologically related to his model could possibly copy it. He furnishes his proof simply by finding similarities between artistic products and the "unequivocal" signs of pathology: "anxiety pleasure", "horror", "voluptuousness", "chaos", "grotesque faces", "scrawls", "revulsion", "greed", "lack of inner contour", "indulgence" - all compulsive urges that are to be eradicated in order that the "faithful, industrious, disciplined, decent, reasoning, self-sacrificing, sincere and honourable person" may come into being.
The Collection remained untouched during the period of National Socialism, for it was useful illustrative material.
Some of the artists whose works were represented in the Collection were murdered: the wrought ironwork specialist Franz Karl Bühler ("Pohl") was placed on the first convoy from the psychiatric hospital in Emmending to Grafeneck in April 1940. Paul Goesch, the architect and painter who prior to his death was interned in Teupitz, was murdered in Hartheim an der Donau. Josef Grebing, businessman from Magdeburg, was transferred from Wiesloch to an unnamed institute and killed. The jobber Johann Faulhaber from Mannheim, also interned in Wiesloch, was likewise transferred and killed.
Their drawings, letters and writings, mostly dating from the early Twenties, have been preserved by the Prinzhorn Collection as a memory trace. They allow life stories to be vividly reconstructed, to produce the first remembrances of the individual "euthanised" patients. Yet remembrance is not simply a matter of interpreting historical trails and keeping watch over them, but also of perceiving present-day outrages without side-stepping them, looking away and remaining silent (Fritz Stern). The Collection is committed to this critical, remembering stance.

Bettina Brand-Claussen
Literatur:
Bettina Brand-Claussen, Das "Museum für pahtologische Kunst" in Heidelberg. Von den Anfängen bis 1945, in: Wahnsinnige Schönheit, Prinzhorn-Sammlung, Ausstellungskatalog Osnabrück, Kulturhistorisches Museum, Heidelberg 1997, S. 6-23.

Dies., Prinzhorns "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken". Ein spätexpressionistisches Manifest, in: Vision und Revision einer Entdeckung, hg. von Bettina Brand-Claussen und Inge Jádi, Katalog zur Eröffnungsausstellung, Heidelberg, Sammlung Prinzhorn, 2001, S. 11-31.

Dies., Häßlich, falsch, krank. "Irrenkunst" und "irre" Kunst zwischen Wilhelm Weygandt und Carl Schneider, in: Psychiatrische Forschung und NS-"Euthanasie", Beiträge zu einer Gedenkveranstaltung an der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg, hg. von Christoph Mundt/ Gerrit Hohendorf/ Maike Rotzoll, Heidelberg 2001, S. 265-320.

Maike Rotzoll/ Bettina Brand-Claussen/ Gerrit Hohendorf, Carl Schneider, die Bildersammlung, die Künstler und der Mord, in: Wahn Welt Bild, Die Sammlung Prinzhorn - Beiträge zur Mueumseröffnung, hg. von Thomas Fuchs/ Bettina Brand-Claussen/ Christoph Mundt/ Inge Jádi, Berlin u.a. 2002 (= Heidelberger Jahrbücher, 2002/XLVI), S. 41-64.

Galleanisti Manifesto: Plain Words: 'Plain Words' was found at the site of a series of bombings against US capitalist targets in 1919,

Galleanisti Manifesto: Plain Words: 'Plain Words' was found at the site of a series of bombings against capitalist targets in 1919,


Plain Words

'Plain Words' was found at the site of a series of bombings against capitalist targets in 1919, including billionaire John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Alexander Palmer. The primes suspects were Galleanists, followers of insurrectionary anarchist Luigi Galleani (1861-1831), founder and editor of the newspaper 'Cronaca Sovversiva.' Published for over 15-years almost entirely in Italian, the magazine made a strong case for "propaganda by the deed," that is: revolutionary violence as opposed to simply propaganda by the word. The Galleanists tried to put the ideas into practice; for example, a Chicago chef added arsenic to the soup for 200 at a banquet to honor Archbishop Mundelein (no one died - he added too much poison and it was all vomited back up). The June 1919 bombings did kill three - one of the bombers, a woman walking by, and a night watchman; in contrast, from 1914 to 1918, tens of millions were maimed or killed in the capitalists' first World War.


The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked.
A time when the social question's solution can be delayed no longer; class war is on and can not cease but with a complete victory for the International proletariat.
The challenge is an old one, oh "democratic" lords of the autocratic republic. We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty, we have aspired to a better world, and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could.
Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses, and build a pedestal to your saints, is over, nothing better can you do to protect your stolen millions, and your usurped fame, than to direct all the power of the murderous institutions you created for your exclusive defense, against the working multitudes rising to a more human conception of life.
The jails, the dungeons you reared to bury all protesting voices, are now replenished with languishing conscientious workers, and never satisfied, you increase their number ever day.
It is history of yesterday that your gunmen were shooting and murdering unarmed masses by the wholesale; it has been the history of every day in your regime; and now all prospects are even worse.
Do not expect us to sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenges and mean to stick to our war duties. We know that all you do is for your defense as a class; we know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself, since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled; we mean to speak for them the voice of dynamite, through the mouth of guns.
Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding, do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your bone-headed slave.
No liberty do you accept but yours; the working people also have a right to freedom, and their rights, our own rights, we have set our minds to protect at any price.
We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though but are all determined to fight to the last, till a man remains buried in your Bastilles, till a hostage of the working class is left to the tortures of your police system, and will never rest until your fall is complete, and the laboring masses have taken possession of all that rightly belongs to them.
There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.
We are ready to do anything and everything to suppress the capitalist class; just as you are doing anything and everything to suppress the proletarian revolution.
Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done by us so far is only a warning that there are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now we are getting into the fight; and you will have a chance to see what liberty-loving people can do.
Do not seek to believe that we are the Germans' or the devil's paid agents; you know well we are class-conscious men with strong determination, and no vulgar liability. And never hope that your cops, and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins.
We know how we stand with you and know how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you will never get all of us * * * and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and riches have turned your heads.
Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!
THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.

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Remembering Journalists Killed by IDF

Obaida Dwaik

Fadal Shanaa

Tom Hurndall

Hamza Shaheen

James Miller

Report: Abbas may pass Goldstone report to Security Council:

 

Report: Abbas may pass Goldstone report to Security Council:

 

The possibility, cited by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat and reported Tuesday by the French news agency AFP, would mark a 180-degree turn from the Palestinian delegation's decision last Friday at the U.N. Human Rights Council to defer a vote on the report until the council's next session in March.
http://snipurl.com/sd6pe

 

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Palestine Will Be Free An animated peace music video

 

Palestine Will Be Free

 

An animated peace music video

 

The video features the story of a young brave Palestinian girl who never loses hope for a better future despite the harsh realities surrounding her.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23653.htm

 

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Iran--US Poll & Officials Back Attacks-2 reports

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Poll: Most in U.S. would back Iran attack:

 

A strong majority of U.S. residents say it is important to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action, a poll indicates
http://snipurl.com/sd6ny

 

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U.S. officials: We're ready to take action on Iran:

 

Administration officials told impatient lawmakers Tuesday that they are ready to take swift and substantial action against Iran if it disregards current diplomatic efforts to stop its alleged nuclear weapons program.
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119192.html

 

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There Is No Recovery Video Interview With Peter Schiff

There Is No Recovery

 

Video Interview With Peter Schiff

 

Click to view
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23650.htm

 

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