(incli)NATION

Heartfield versus Hitler: Hitler was No Surprise

"Willett's book Heartfield versus Hitler is an absolute refutation to the many who attempted to excuse their tolerance and/or support of Hitler's rise to power with the disingenuous claim:

'We did not know.'

As Heartfield's images from the 1930s make clear, Hitler's character and intentions were far from secret."

Link: John Heartfield.

Left, Hitler erzahlt Marchen
Hitler tells us a scary bedtime story

"Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe, ich bin eingekreist!"
Help! Help! I'm surrounded via ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

and Wit

Perfect From Now On: John Sellers on Indie Rock

We are always interested in how critics and other like-minded folk attempt to contextualize slippery cultural objects like painting, television, quilts, and music, so this afternoon we will be picking up a copy of John Sellers' "Perfect From Now On". Has anyone knocked this off their list yet? If so, do share...

From Eric J Lawrence @ KCRW: "Spring has sprung, and while that might incline you to start thinking about outdoor activities, here are a few literary reasons to keep you in your favorite reading chair at least until beach weather.  “Perfect From Now On” is a cheeky memoir from journalist John Sellers about his discovery of 90s-era indie rock.  Despite a shameful lack of appreciation for The Fall, Sellers writes charmingly about his obsessions, especially as he describes his encounter with Guided By Voices during their farewell tour."

Is Not Magazine; AU

Is Not Magazine is an Australian magazine in the form of a 1.5m x 2m bill poster that goes on display at outdoor sites for everyone to read/scribble on. You can even fill in the crossword. It’s independently published and carries no ads. It’s as much a piece of street art as a publishing project.

For more info click here .

via Neatorama

Rip Torn Kicks Norman Mailer's Ass

I'm in the middle of reading Mailer's "Castle in the Clouds" [holding out judgement] and while googling the old man I ran across this:

On the set of the 1970 film Maidstone, Rip Torn assaults Norman Mailer with a hammer, and Mailer retaliates by biting off a piece of Torn's ear:

Who could we get to do the updated version? Eggers v. Foster Wallace? Whitehead v. Eugenides, Ha!

Some backstory:

Norman Mailer created a film in the late 60s called MAIDSTONE. He played the part of a famous movie director who is considering a run for the presidency. Rip Torn played his potential assassin. At the end of filming, Rip appeared to get a little too far into his role, and he attacked Mailer on camera with a hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by viciously biting into Torn's ear, drawing even more blood. This is the fight.

It's debatable how "surprised" that Mailer was by the attack, but it should be noted that he still had the camera crew hanging around and filming, the day after production had allegedly "ended" on the picture. However, the blood from both men is undeniably real, as are the horrified reactions of Mailer's children (his wife, on the other hand, seems to be overacting badly).

More backstory here.

[via iFilm.]

via Panpopticist

25 Years of Love & Rockets @ Fantagraphics, Seattle Saturday/Sunday

"Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez's Love & Rockets is the alternative comics success story of the 80's and 90's. If the publication of Zap #1 in 1967 "officially" marks the beginning of underground comix, the publication of Love & Rockets #1 in 1982 could be said to "officially" mark the beginning of the '80's comics renaissance clumsily called alternative comics.

"Both Gilbert and Jaime credit the punk rock explosion of the late '70's with broadening their horizons and leading them to reflect their personal experience in their comics.

"Fantagraphics began publishing Los Bros. in 1982. While the original Love & Rockets ended in 1996 with its 50th issue, popular demand caused the Bros. to revive the title five years later in a slightly different format, and it continues to be published every four months."

What:Original art from the punk-inspired indie comic classic.
Why: Puts Archie and Jughead to shame.
When: Reception with Los Bros Hernandez, Sat., 5-8 p.m.; panel discussion and book signing, Sun., 1-3 p.m.

via Fantagraphics Bookstore, 1201 S. Vale St., at Airport Way (206-658-0110).

Library Thing; A Book-lover's Paradise

This is the best new time-waster on the web. LibraryThing:

Jim Harrison v. the Naked Bourgeoisie

While I am working up an appropriate response to Jim Harrison's article in the NYT today: Feed The Poets - Books - Review - New York Times. I'm enjoying this little ditty via Neatorama:
	When Victor Hugo [wiki], the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer’s block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he’d have nothing to do but sit down and write.
	Ernest Hemingway [wiki] did not only write A Farewell to Arms, he also said farewell to clothes! The inside dirt is that Hemingway wrote nude, standing up, with his typewriter about waist level. Indeed, there might be a nudist streak in the Hemingway genes: Ernest’s cousin Edward Hemingway opened Britain’s oldest nudist colony, a nine-bedroom chateau called Metherell Towers, back in the 1930s!
	Perhaps it’s not so surprising that D.H. Lawrence [wiki], who wrote the controversial (and censored) erotic book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, liked to climb mulberry trees, in the nude, before he came down and wrote.
	James Whitcomb Riley [wiki], America’s "Hoosier Poet," had his friends lock him up in a hotel room to write, naked, so he wouldn’t be tempted to go down to the bar for a drink.
	French poet and author Edmond Rostand [wiki], who is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac, was sick of being interrupted by his friends that he took up working naked in his bathtub.
	Apparently Rostand wasn’t the only one with this bright idea - Benjamin Franklin [wiki] also liked to take baths. In fact, he liked to take "air baths," where he sit around naked in a cold room for an hour or so while he wrote.
	Mystery writer Agatha Christie [wiki], whose books have been translated in 40 languages and outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, liked to write anywhere, including in the bathtub! Sources: A Blank Page by Sam Elmore, In The Nude by So Many Books, Literary Life and Other Curiosities by Robert Hendrickson, Dressing to Write by Bibi’s Beat.

W.J.T. Mitchell @ Sculpture Center Tomorrow

In NYC tomorrow night? Be sure to catch W.J.T. Mitchell--author of What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images and editor of Critical Inquiry and a professor at the University of Chicago in the Departments of English Literature and Art History--presents some of the concepts that inspired SculptureCenter’s upcoming group exhibition, The Happiness of Objects, tomorrow night, Jan. 25th.

Mitchell has come a long way since his Picture Theory days, and as that volume was cited ad nauseum in the nineties, that is saying something.

Fredric Jameson on Mitchell's most recent work, What Do Pictures Want?:

This lively collection of essays is something more than a critical tour of the problematics of contemporary art theory; it is more than a set of pertinent (or impertinent) interventions on a series of current exhibits, films, and images of all kinds; more even than a tireless and insistent reproblematization of everybody's work on pictures, images, and image society, turning all the new ideas back into questions and more questions. It is also the elaboration of what is surely destined to become an influential new tripartite concept of the object, namely as idol, fetish, and totem."

And be sure to grab a copy of his forthcoming, The Late Derrida, this April.

Thursday, January 25, 7pm - W.J.T. Mitchell at Sculpturecenter.

Ong on Oral v. Written [blogging the self]

The question is, "How does blogging [that fluid reading/writing activity] change our sense of ourselves?"restructures human consciousness. In this history of literacy, the spoken word is something that wells up directly from the human unconscious, whereas written language is expressed through artificial (i.e. human-made) frameworks, systems of "consciously contrived, articulable rules." These rules (and their runes) create a scaffold for the brain, which, now able to engage with complex ideas in contemplative solitude as opposed to interlocution, begins to conceive of itself as an individual entity rather than as part of a collective. Literate cultures are thus cognitively different than oral ones...

[True, these arguments do smack of the same theories that had everyone worked up ten years ago. Remember "interactivity" and the death of the "Author"?]

"Ong called the invention of writing the "technologizing of the word," a process that fundamentally

"What's so interesting here, is that it seems that the age of networked reading and writing promises to get us much closer to one of the crucial aspects of oral culture — the sense that the story teller/author and the audience/reader are joined together in a collective enterprise where the actions of each will have a direct and noticeable impact on the other.

via futureofthebook

"The Castle in the Forest" - Mailer's first novel in 10 years

"The Castle in the Forest" - Mailer's first novel in 10 years is not just the almost superhumanly detached fulfillment of the somewhat depressed boast he made nearly half a century ago in "Advertisements for Myself": "I wish to attempt an entrance into the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm and Time." This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien.

No wonder it is narrated by a devil. Mailer doesn't inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them.

In "The Castle in the Forest," the devil-narrator - who is living in the body of an SS man named Dieter - tells a little tale about the tale he is telling. "It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel. I do possess the freedom to enter many a mind." Those two sentences form the crux of Mailer's originality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html?8bu&emc=bu

via NYT