Dark Hunch

[Totenkopf]

Ah you poor thing. Je peux lire un petite frenchy or whatever, but prefer Deutsch, as did Buk, I believe. He was more "rightist" than most hepcats realize.

BukowskiSpeak's great for like wannabe bank robbers or guys in stir, but not my fave: the Buk-fetish's like cheap dope or something. He was overrated I believe, but then so were Kerouac and the rest. One beat writer who did some entertaining if wicked prose was Terry Southern, but he wasn't too PC. Sort of like HS Thompson but smarter.

[mnaz]

It's a noble's sport really: more like Bach than bobby dylan.

"It's a noble's sport really". OK, I'll buy that. Bush is only a passing injustice, a symptom of a larger breakdown. OK fine. And a poet cannot waste too much time on symptoms-- his or herself included. OK fine, I'll buy that. Why is knowing two or three languages so critical to poetic expression? Does there come a point when that only gets in the way? And would Bach ever listen to Dylan, given a chance?

[westcoast]

Which Germanic artists do you favour?

Do you enjoy Surrealism? Georges Bataille?

I am currently exploring the prose and poetry of Eugenio De Andrade, a Portuguese poet.

[Totenkopf]

I have read a bit of Battaile. Intense, wild, sort of Nietzschean but rather more decadent: I have an old Evergreen Review (maybe to be hawked on ebay!) with some Battaile in it; a rather long ode to a "putain", and her, uh, most valuable asset. Years ago I read Breton ("the real artist should rush into the street and start shooting people at random" or somethin') but drifted away from that sort of jass. I enjoy reading like.....Carnap...or history, econ.

[westcoast]

an interesting philosopher. taught himself Esperanto! there ya go!

[Totenkopf]

Yeah. Carnap was a bit of a quack, but there's something to be admired in the Joe Friday school of philosophy (aka positivism), or writing really, however mundane to belle-lettrists. Even Papa Marx had a positivistic streak.

[mnaz]

Joe Friday? But he was a cop, no? He busted many a positivist in his day, I imagine.

[westcoast]

*lol*

[Totenkopf]

There were good positivists, and bad ones, just like there are good cops, and bad ones. Even Jack Webb, Dragnet founder, had a bit of a Harry Truman like spirit.

The point wasn't about cops really. More about literary deception. However grand Joyce's Ulysses seems it's hardly anything compared to say a few pages of real history regarding trench warfare

[westcoast]

compromise isn't art?

do you teach literature? you are well versed and informed.

~westcoast

[mnaz]

Literary deception? What would, say, a few pages of real history regarding trench warfare amount to in the end but that? Fine. We have the journals. We have our history texts. So what caused it? What inside made it happen? These things are never confined to any one physical battlefield.