New translation: Ribemont-Dessaignes, The Acetyline Eye: Dada Texts 1915-1922

New Dada Poetry Release!

The Acetyline Eye: Dada Texts 1915-1922 

by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes

Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann

 
40+ pages of The Paris Dada mover-&-shaker's first full chapbook of poems and manifestos ever published in English, only $3.50 + s/h!

CLICK HERE for more info & to purchase!

"Topia Tat" performed on Radio Klebnikov

I'm honoured to have had my poem "Topia Tat" performed/incorporated (twice-and-a-half) into this week's episode of Radio Klebnikov! My text comes in around the 31-minute mark til around 36 minutes, but the episode is an integral stream of multilingual avant-garde sound in which things drift, flow together and apart, and I urge you to take the whole experience in...

Here is the written programme for the episode, containing the text.

Thanks to Dirk Vekemans et. al. for this haunting embodiment/s of that text!

Just released: Black Scat Review #18!

 

 

The Gautier, Verlaine and Rimbaud poems therein are my first translations published outside mOnocle-Lash. A little offering of 19th Century avant-garde poems about partying.

 

Black Scat is a lively literary cabaret-act of experimental fiction, poetry, erotica, translations of 19th Century Bohemian and Decadent work, and what have you – the flagship PRINT journal of a very interesting press (the name a play off the 19th Century Bohemian group/cabaret/journal Black Cat).

Buy Here: https://blackscatbooks.com/2019/11/13/hot-off-the-press-2/

ANOTHER NEW RELEASE and a half!

THE IN-APPROPRIATED PRESS #16 is now available! Purchase Here!

 

 

This issue includes a small section devoted to Steve Dalachinsky, who passed away as it was being edited. Featuring work by Steve Dalachinsky, Philosophy Inc, Olchar E. Lindsann, Scott MacLeod, Wilheim Katastrof, Musicmaster, Admiral Aaron Andrews, J.D. Nelson, William Repass, Jim Leftwich, John M. Bennett, Jack Foley, Joe Abel, Dr. mOBiUs dITcH, Ivan Argüelles, bela b. Grimm, Catherine Mehrl Bennett, Tom Cassidy, Mark Young, Volodymyr Bilyk, Juanita Chriss, Binx the Kitten, & Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes.

 

As a special bonus, the first 10 monocle-lash purchases (i.e. every single purchase and then some...) will receive a full set of four new mOnocle-Lash bookmarks by C. Mehrl Bennett, Musicmaster, Reid Wood, and Jim Leftwich.

 

Also newly available in pamphlet form is Lindsann's essay "Speaking of Difference" which appeared in the in-Appropriated Press #10. Add it to your order for less than a buck HERE!

 

And be ready for more publications, including one by Alfred Jarry (translated by Amy Oliver) before the year ends!

New mOnocle-Lash Release/s on the Russian Avant-Garde!

NEW PUBLICATION + a SPECIAL PROMOTION for the full collection of mOnocle-Lash's publications of the RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE!

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Buy AT COST here: https://monoclelash.wordpress.com/new-publications/

Support the continuation of avant-garde publishing in print!

Death to Art
–by Vasilisk Gnedov
Translated by Volodymyr Bilyk
-cover by Bradley Chriss

The Poet Vasilisk Gnedov was a unique and seminal figure in the Russian Futurist movement, but remains virtually unknown in English. This double translation of Gnedov’s minimal 1913 masterpiece by the Ukranian avant-garde poet Volodymyr Bilyk, in which two translations using distinct approaches face off against each other and meet in the book’s centerfold, reveal both Gnedov’s linguistic playfulness and his previously-unnoticed interventions of the Ukrainian language into his primarily Russian texts. In these poems, language is compressed past the point which syntax or even words can support, and new crystalline units of language glisten up at us from the page. With a tipped-in biographical introduction by the translator.

30 pgs on folded 8.5”x11” + tipped-in Introduction.  Oct, A.Da. 103/A.H. 189 (2019)
$2.75 + 1.00 s/h OR TRADE, or PURCHASE AS PART OF RUSSIAN SET BELOW AT DISCOUNT!

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The Russian Avant-Garde Collection: 5 Chapbook Set
–by Gleb Kolomiets, Denis Beznesov, Vasilisk Gnedov, Volodymyr Bilyk, Inna Kirillova, & others.
 


Over the past decade, mOnocle-Lash’s mission has slowly but steadily encompassed the forging of alliances among the Russian-speaking avant-garde, and this specially-packaged and -priced set collects five mOnocle-Lash publications of English-language translations of Russian texts, asemia and texts written in English by Russian writers, and collaborations with Russian presses and groups, spanning the years 2013 to our very newest release, mailed together as a “boxed” set in a specially printed envelope, customized with rubber-stamps in the zaum tradition.
The set ordinarily represents $1.50 savings over all books brought separately (with the envelope tossed in). Through the end of 2019, our special promotion offers it to you AT COST for $15!
Includes:

1. The Slova-Synapse Bilingual Issue, ed. Gleb Kolomiets & Olchar Lindsann (2015): The Russian journal Slova in partnership with mOnocle-Lash’s flagship occasional-periodical Synapse, with all texts presented in parallel English and Russian – 64 pages of underground poetry, art, & essays by the Russian and Anglophone avant-gardes.
2. The Outer Circle – Ideas and Forms of the Contemporary Russian Avant-Garde, ed. Gleb Kolomiets & Olchar Lindsann (2014): The exhibition catalog of the exhibition of the same name, organized by mOnocle-Lash and Slova, and held in the Liminal Gallery in Roanoke, Virginia in March 2014. Includes essays, manifestos, biographies of participating artists and writers, and listings of exhibited pieces.
3. Glasseyed Pipe, by Denis Beznesov (2014): Over 40 pages of continually unpredictable and playful verse in English by the Russian avant-garde poet.
4. New Hamlet, by Gleb Kolomiets & Inna Kirillova (2013): A darkly sardonic play that examines family dysfunction in post-Soviet Russia.
5. Death to Art, by Vasilisk Gnedov, trans. Volodymyr Bilyk (1913/2019): A double translation of the Russian Futurist’s minimal 1913 masterpiece, rendered into English twice by the Ukranian avant-garde poet Volodymyr Bilyk, using distinct approaches to face off against each other, meeting in the book’s centerfold.

Issued as a Set in October, A.Da. 103/A.H. 189 (2019) $15 + 6.00 s/h

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Lecture: A Social History of the Avant-Garde

On July 4 at the AfterMAF festival in Roanoke, VA, I delivered a lecture on the 19th Century Avant-Garde, focusing on the social history, rather than the aesthetic – an anthropological and micro-historical rather than "art/literary history" approach. Here's the video of the presentation. I only got through the Symbolists in the lecture that day, but I'm posting here the lecture notes carrying the story all the way up to the present, and the corresponding slides for the notes, which contain much more detailed information.

I've not had time to assemble a bibliography specific to this lecture, but to trace a bit of information or do follow-up research on your own, email me at olindsann@gmail.com (messages sent via the blog have a tendency not to reach me for months) and I can point you toward relevant sources and/or my bibliographies of related projects. This may eventually become a book, but that would be several years down the road.

Here's the video of the lecture up to the end of the 19th Century (Romanticism through Symbolism & Decadence):

Here are the LECTURE NOTES for the entire history.

Here the accompanying SLIDES including images, charts, and more detailed information referred to in the lecture.

Resurrecting the Bouzingo: Lecture: A Social History of the Avant-Garde

Resurrecting the Bouzingo: Lecture: A Social History of the Avant-Garde: On July 4 at the AfterMAF festival in Roanoke, VA, I delivered a lecture on the 19th Century Avant-Garde, focusing on the social history, ...

Starting the long process of preparing an edition of my Collected Essays, 2005–20 (hoping to publish next year or 2021). It'll leave out a few stray and early pieces but also includes a lot of short, scattered writings, some unpublished work, and I plan to ask a few people to include their essays that directly prompted or responded to my own. A prospective table of contents (which will doubtless grow as I keep writing over the next year):

 

 

COLLECTED ESSAYS

 

Introduction

 

PART 1: EARLY POLEMICS

1. Three Evils of Modernism: Explained! (2004)
2. Seek and Destroy: Modernist Strategies for the Suppression of Anti-Art (2005)
3. Toward a Breathing Text: The Art of Madness (2005)

 

PART 2: ON COUNTERCULTURE, MICROCULTURE, & PRAXIS

1. Read This Shit: Some Obvious Remarks on the Necessity of the Book (2006?)
2. Make it Home, Not Art [w/New Jersey PNA] (2007)
3. Against Complicity: On the Hydra-Headed Collective (2007)
4. Dartington, A Eulogy: An Open Letter on Community, Pedagogy, History, and the Life & Death of Utopian Institutions (2010)
5. WORD FOR/WORD INTERVIEW??? (2010)
6. On Performance and Documentation (from blog) (c.2010/11?)
7. On Fun (2011)
8. Notes on Organising Communal Events (2014)
9. Introduction to The Outer Circle: Ideas and Forms of the Contemporary Russian Avant-Garde (2014)
10. Extract from King Jaundice on invisibility of unskilled labour to power (2015)
11. Slova extract from Open Letter to the Avant-Garde (2016)
12. On Pedagogy and Disciplinarity (c. 2017)
13. How Do We Know? A Few Notes on Reclaiming Knowledge for Life (2017)
14. Post-NeoAbsurdist Conversation Notes (2018)
15. Learning Behaviors: Violence and the American Schools (2018)
16. S.tandards O.f L.earning (2018)
17. Speaking of Difference: A Loosely Related Collocation of Axioms (2018)
18. On the Community of Activated Obsessions (2018)
19. Section 1 of Avantopia with Dummies (2019)

 

PART 3: ON TRADITION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

1. Cheating Art History (2005)
2. On Anachronism as Dissent (2006 /09)
3. Toward a Radical Historiography: Creative Sociality and the Traditions of Dissent (2011 /)
4. Manifesto on Archiving FROM BOOKMARK (2012 /15?)
5. Practical notes on Micro-Archiving
6. Notes on the Emergence of the Yellow Sign (c.2014)
7. On Feminism in Utopian & Marxist Socialism (2014)
8. Post-script to King Jaundice (2015)
9. Letter to Emily Wampler on Krysinski on the Avant-Garde (c.2016?)
10. Forward (and Back), Editorial Statement of Révenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories (2016)
11. pRe-face to Some Potential Histories (2017)
12. Preface to Theatres of War in the Assault on Culture (2019)

 

PART 4: ON WRITING & MYSTICISM

1. Carmen Pro Pleroma: A Brief Treatise Concerning the Invocation of Yog Sothoth (2006 /14)
2. Toward (and away from) a (potential) Nagean Pataphysics (2006 /14)
3. Supplemental Open Letter regarding ‘Toward a Nagean Pataphysics’ (2006 /2014)
4. + EXCERPTS FROM ECSTATIC NERVE
5. Preface to Post-Neo Anti-Prophesies (2011)
6. Useless Preface to a Romantasemic Writing [w/Leftwich & Gautier] (2014)
7. On Intellectual Culture and the Experience of Time (c.2016)
8. On Reading as Necromancy (c.2017)
9. A Rant and Object Lesson in Translation, Respect, & Romanticist Poetics (2018)
10. Notes on New Criticism, Post-Structuralism, & Post-Modernism (c.2018)
11. Galatea Resurrects Post on the Profanities Poems (2018)
12. On the Real and its Other (c.2018)
13. On the Kabbala (c. 2018)
14. Two Cities: On Carcosa and Golgonooza (2018)

 

PART 5: CRITICISM

1. A Moment of Bennett (2009)
2. Introduction to Revised Edition of Jim Leftwich’s Doubt (2009)
3. Micro-Essay on Peter Ganick’s Remove a Concept (2009)
4. Micro-Essay on Peter Ganick’s It’s Only Po-Et-Ry and I like It (2010)
5. Introduction to John M. Bennett’s Textis Globbolalicus, Vol. 3 (2011)
6. Eulogy for Jeff Hanneman (2013)
7. Introduction to Petrus Borel’s Lycanthropy: Shreds Torn from ‘Rhapsodies’ (2014)
8. Preface to Denis Beznesov’s Glasseyed Pipe (2014)
9. Micro-Essay on Agrüelles’ Fiat Lux (2014)
10. Preface to Joseph Bouchardy’s The Garrick Remedy (2015)
11. Review of Jules Verne’s Paris in the 20th Century (2015)
12. Introduction to Imogene Engine’s I, Engine: Collected & New Works (2016)
13. Introduction to Leftwich’s Rascible & Kempt, Vol. 2 (2016)
14. Micro-Essay on Vol. 2 (2016)
15. Review of Fiddler’s Green Magazine (2017)
16. Critical Afterward to Argüelles’ Fragments of a Gone World: Joe & I & Others: Poems (2017)
17. Two Death Metal Shows: A Micro- Anti- Review (2017)
18. Mini-Review of Claire Goldberg Moses & Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (2018)
19. Publisher’s Forward to Vol. 4 of Nellson’s translation of Wordsworth’s Prelude (2018)
20. 3 Zine Micro-Reviews (2018)
21. Micro-Essay on Jim Leftwich & Billy Bob Beamer’s Sound Rituals (2018)
22. Review of mIEKEL aND, Hreadlines du jour (2019)
23. Review of Georges Bataille et. al., The Sacred Conspiracy (2019)
24. Review of Stéphane Mallarmé, The Book (2019)

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Going on Mini-Tour!

It's taken over 15 years, but holy crap I'm doing a (short) tour:

July 23: Baltimore, MD @ the true vine record shop

July 24: Easton, PA @ the Book & Puppet Co.

July 25: West Haven, CT @ Crunch House

July 26: Kingston, NY @ Kingston Artists Collective + Cafe

July 27: Willimantic, CT @ Willimantic Records

July 28: Philadelphia, PA @ Vox Populi

Olchar Lindsann & Jack Wright

 
Crashing Around

Samples of Olchar here and Jack here

Olchar Lindsann would be called a sound poet, but that's just a cover for creative howling --“vocal contortions & frothing at the mouth." Trigger warning for slobbering, but draws the line at spitting. Yes he does write, but he will only be scribbling on this tour behind the scenes. He's been called "A rootless cosmopolitan and cultural radical who finds scraps of solace and inspiration down by the Roanoke River"--a wanderer from the Midwest, then the UK, and back to New Jersey, but now frimly rooted in Roanoke, where he lives a relatively normal life, like the rest of us (ahem, speak for yourself...)
 

Jack Wright responds to the word "musician" and "saxophonist" (among others) and he too is mild-mannered in most social situations, doesn't kill most animals, and obeys most road signs. He improvises, sometimes astutely, sometimes foolishly, but never with the intent to make "music." Whatever it is, he makes more sounds on the saxophone than you are likely to have heard.
 

The two will be on tour end of July--Baltimore the 23rd at the True Vine; Easton the 24th at the Book and Puppet; New Haven the 25th at Crunch House; Kingston at the Art Cafe the 26th; Willimantic CT at the Record Store; and finishing up the 27th in Philly . They'll perform together vocally as a duo, and separately as well, doing whatever they please.

New Translation Release: André Salmon's Cartomancy

New Release:

Cartomancy


–– by André Salmon & Apa

–––– translated by Olchar E. Lindsann



 

 

 

André Salmon (1881-1969) was one of the originators of literary Cubism, publishing more than twenty books of avant-garde poetry, around a dozen books of fiction, and among the first monographs of many of the Cubist and other modernist painters; very little of his work (especially his poetry and fiction) has been translated into English.

 

This densely enigmatic, yet pretty raunchy poem cycle reflects Salmon’s idiosyncratic involvement with hermeticism and the occult, using the standard playing deck rather than the Tarot. Salmon builds a dense collage of hermetic, mythological, and historical systems into these extremely compressed little stanzas, while the syntax becomes increasingly fractured as they progress.

 

The accompanying cubist card designs were designed in conjunction with Salmon’s text by the Spanish cartoonist Apa (Felíu Elías Bracons).

 

The poem and images were published in 1921 in Issue 2 of the Cubo-Dadaist journal Action, edited by Pierre Reverdy. Due to a printer’s or editor’s error, in all copies the sequence was truncated partway through the tenth poem, and apparently never reprinted. The remainder is lost to history.

 

13 pgs. on folded 8.5″x11″. Feb., A.Da. 103. (2019 Anti-Vulgar)

$1.50 + 0.75 s/h or trade

Purchase Here

NEW PUBLICATION!

NOW AVAILABLE on mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press: the First Half of my 'pataphysical, uh "Gothic", um, (anti-)"Novel" set in a mash-up cross-temporal avant-garde utopia THE HORSE-KILLER!

 

The Korse-Killer: A Gothic Novel of the Avant-Garde; Vol. I

–by Monk O’Lindsann

 

An Anti-Tale of Melodrama, Passion, Blasphemy, & Absurdity in an Avant-Garde Anti-Utopia Beyond Time, Space, or Sense – a world where poets, artists, and mystics from two centuries of countercultural anarchy live, love, and beat their auxiliary brainpan cenacle monocles side-by-side, none of them making a damn lick of sense. The first of two volumes; look for the conclusion around 2021-22!

“Her voluptuousness was beyond the overweaning hubris of description. She rent her moustache, beat her auxiliary breast, and not daring to quit Alfred Jarry, endeavoured by bruitist cries to summon the horse-killers to her conspiratorial collaboration. She at length succeeded. Alarmed by her shrieks, several of the Brothers-in-Anti leapt savagely to the spot, and the Historiographer was conveyed back to the Catacombs. He was immediately put to gingerbread-coffin, and the horse-killer who officiated as Shaman and Barber-Surgeon to the Cénacle prepared to examine the wound. By this unconsciousness Alfred Jarry’s brain-pan had swelled to an extraordinary opacity; the remedies which had been administered to him, ’tis sophistical, restored him to intersticial life, but not to his senses; he raved in all the ecstasies of delirium, foamed at the dada, and four of the strongest horse-killers were scarcely able to firmly clench him in his gingerbread-coffin.”

“A grand old hack of good old “Monk”Lewis’ classic gothic old novel, turned inside out and old unanti’d I hear; I couldn’t old make it through it myself. (old)”

     ––Sir Chad Niral-Nelson 

 

Perfect-bound, 6″x9″, 168 pgs. Jan., A.Da. 103 / A.H. 189 (2019 Anti-Vulgar)

$15.00 + s/h

 

at mOnocle-Lash, but ultimately (sorry) you'll end up buying it via Amazon (this will probably be the last one like that)

Seven New Releases from mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press!

A Fistful of New Releases from mOnocle-Lash!

Our winter labour have paid off, and mOnocle-Lash is proud to present one full-length AND one chapbook of poetry, new issues of BOTH of our journals, and three new TLPs.

Check out the website for details and to buy PRINT copies and download FREE EBOOKS of all releases!

Leftwich & beamer’s Sound Rituals must be purchased through Amazon; the rest are available at the mOnocle-Lash website. For what it’s worth, the price of all seven is under $25… AND I LOVE TO TRADE…

(And, all titles are available as free ebooks via the Internet Archive, linked through the m-Lash website)

1) Sound Rituals
by Jim Leftwich & billy bob beamer, Introduction by John M. Bennett
Playful and plaintive collaborative Poems by two avant-masters –
Perfect-bound, 92 pgs. Jan., A.Da. 102 (2018) – $9.00 + s/h

2) The Prelude–or, I Get Smarter: A Poem About Me”, Volume 4.
–by William Wordsworth, Translated into Even-More-Boring-and-Trite by Fast-Sedan Nellson.
The widely-anticipated continuation of mOnocle-Lash’s most popular series.
20 pgs. on folded 8.5” x 11”. Jan., A.Da. 102 (2018) – $2.00 + 0.50 s/h

3) Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories. Issue 3.
–ed. Olchar E. Lindsann
Histories & Translations of the 19th Century Avant-garde; this issue focuses on libertine currents among the Bouzingo group (1829-34) and tension between underground and commercial culture.
36 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. Jan., A.Da. 102/A.H. 188 (2018) – $5.50 + 1.50 s/h

4) THE IN-APPROPRIATED PRESS #9: The Impeccable Pig.
––ed. Olchar E. Lindsann
Post-NeoAbsurdist anti-culture from Roanoke, VA and around the world; this issue includes reports from the infamous anti-Klan rally at Charlottesville and the Richmond Zine Fest.
16 pgs on folded 11”x17”. Jan., A.Da. 102 (2018)
$3.00 + 1.00 s/h

5–7/8) Warren Fry  TLP  4-Pack!
Four Tiny, Tacky Little pamphlets by Warren Fry (three of them brand-new) for only $1.00! Includes TWO micro-Role-Playing Games, some collage, and a nonsensical collaboration with Olchar E. Lindsann.
8 pgs. each on quartered 8.5” x 11”.
Four-Piece Set for $1.00 + 0.75 s/h or trade.

Now Available: ARTHUR DIES, Vol. 2

Arthur Dies, First Chronicle, Vol. 2, is officially released, on Luna Bisonte!

This is my poetic life's work, one of the few in which I've tried/am trying to articulate, in one form, my entire praxis and world-view (along with The Ecstatic Nerve and a couple unpublished projects). Nearly 200 pages of avant-archaic anti-epic verse.

Buy Here
 

From Ivan Argüelles' Introduction:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As archaic as any in an era caught between a crumbling Roman Empire and an as yet undefined future Middle Kingdom, in an outlying and ghostly province where myth and language distort into a syntax forged from a linguistic spoon heated by metaphysics and madness, ARTHUR DIES takes root in the deracinated mind of a chronicler not at home in any temporal scheme and who remains uninhibited by orthographies and grammar rules. Moons away from the modern, Olchar E. Lindsann's projected verse history of the legendary King Arthur takes the reader into realms haunted by lost books and languages in formation. Lopped off words, abstractions and musings about mostly death and transformation, the text as it unravels in its its varying and diverse interpolations and asides becomes a music at times of unbearable beauty and imagination.
Luna Bisonte Prods has now published the first 2 volumes of ARTHUR DIES :First chronicle, heirs of Constantine, vol. 1 published in 2015 and now vol. 2 in 2017. This work in progress with its linguistic inventiveness may be like nothing written since Finnegans Wake! Its obvious antecedent is Malory's Le Morte Darthur, the outstanding prose work of Middle English, and its French originals. Other sources include Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and of course William Blake. But it delves deeper than that, as if into some rusted Jungian unconscious, dredging to light deformed or mangled linguistic and mythic artifacts, barely pronounceable in the dreamer's ear.
[ . . . ]
Indeed as one proceeds through this marvelous text familiar characters, such as Merlin or Vivienne, are encountered beyond the reach of common language, in a world of divinations and sepulchers, in domains where chaotic punctuation and syntactic disorder abound. This is in fact an epic both in the traditional sense of the word, and in the approach of an anti-poetics perspective of what can be undone in that tradition. In its sweeping texts and and contexts it embodies not only the imagined or fictive culture of the twilight era alluded to, but those of our own post-modern and failed civilization with all its cultural and literary -isms that have arisen from an original "avant-garde". Lindsann combines the mythical Avalon with Blake's Albion, pursuing these emblematic nomenclatures to their illogical fusion in an always enigmatic concatenation of events and personages flung about in a supreme and deft literary whirl.
The style and techniques of this epic are at the same its essence: the nonchalant and often ambiguous halts and starts, incomplete sentences, apparently erratic capitalizations, stuttering repetitions, long blocks of prose (as in v. 2) , hand-drawn diagrams (in v. 2), misspellings and deliberately archaic language going back to Middle English or Anglo-Saxon, which of course lend an authenticity to the poem.
[ . . . ]
It is important to note that vol. 1 and 2 differ in stylistic respects quite markedly. Vol. 1 appears more traditionally lyrical, for all its deviant and highly experimental aspects, in both its sensibilities and format, while vol. 2 has a more rugged archaic epic feel, more like the Iliad in its martial paeans and choruses. Vol. 2 contains long monolithic prose chronicle sections that give it an aspect of historicity, and which often bring us up to date with references to Standing Rock, Putin, Homeland Security, etc.
[ . . . ]
This work, of which these are only the first two installments (Arthur is yet to be born, let alone die), is one of sheer, mad genius, alternately enervating and exhilarating, with few if any parallels in contemporary literature. One can question whether this is really poetry or merely the end of literature itself.

Three New mOnocle-Lash Releases

JUST REALEASED! Three New Publications from Monocle-Lash Anti-Press, available in print practically at cost, or as FREE PDFs from the m-Lash website!

All edited by me, two containing my short essays and translations––

This is a distinctly cross-generational release:  Two of these are published under the Revenants Editions imprint and bring to light texts from the very early avant-garde for the first time in English, and the first time in any language for over a century. The other makes one of the first and most hated/popular turn-coat apostates in avant-history accessible to a new generation of lazy readers:

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1.) Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories. Issue 1.
–ed. Olchar E. Lindsann

Rêvenance is the flagship journal of the Revenant Editions series, dedicated to the forgotten or untold histories of 19th Century avant-garde and other countercultures. It includes essays, translations, and many experimental forms of historical writing and research that connect those traditions to continuing radical communities today.
 
The first issue features translations (by Olchar Lindsann and Raymond Ernest André III) of work by Alphonse Allais, Gérard de Nerval, Maurice Rollinat, Alphonse Karr & Georges d’Heylli; poetic re-workings of Charles Nodier & Michel Roly by John M. Bennett; poems in Volapük by Francis Vielé-Griffin and Michael Helsem; essays by Gleb Kolomiets and Olchar Lindsann; visual texts by Edward Kulemin; and a conversation by Jim Leftwich, John M. Bennett & Peter Ciccariello about Rea Nikonova, Malevich, and the Incoherents group of the 1880s.
 
32 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. Sept., A.Da. 100 (2016).
$5.00 + 1.00 s/h or Free Download
 

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2.) Pif Paf Patapan! A Sampler of Phonetic Poetry From the 19th Century
–by Paul Verlaine, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, & Francis Vielé-Griffin; ed. Olchar E. Lindsann
 
Though Phonetic Poetry as a designated, focused practice was developed in the early years of the 20th Century, experiments with phonetics and non-semantic sound have been explored in the avant-garde since at least 1830. These are the poets who were read by the Futurists, Dadas, and Zoumists, and whose experiments (and others’?) they consolidated into a new form.
8 pgs on folded 8.5” x 11”. Sept., A.Da. 100 (2016).
$1.00 + 1.00 s/h or Free Download
NOTE: Verlaine poem is flawed in the online version of the PDF, due to some obscure coding flaw that changes PDFs when displayed online. Email monoclelash@gmail.com for a free uncorrupted version of the file. Sorry!
 

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3.) The Prelude: Book 3
—by William Wordsworth
——translated into Even-More-Boring-and-Trite by Fast Sedan Nellson
 
From the self-proclaimed ‘Prince of Translators’, this is the third volume in Nellson’s copiously annotated translation of Wordsworth’s 230-page biographical poem into an obscure dialect of English, ‘Even-More-Boring-and-Trite’. (Wordsworth’s original poem is in a related dialect, ‘Boring-and-Trite’.) To be issued over several years as a set of 14 volumes, followed by an eventual deluxe perfect-bound edition with parallel translation and extensive introduction and commentary.
Vol. III Continues Wordsworth’s boring adventures as “I Live in Cambridge”.
 
16 pgs. on folded 8.5″x11″. Feb, A.Da. 96. (2012 Anti-Vulgar)
$1.50 + 1.00 s/h or trade or Free Download
 

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Later this month, look for the long-awaited 'Collected Works' of Imogene Engine, and maybe some more goodies as well!

"The Immortal Accursed" published in 'Mythic Delirium'

Since I've been to busy to share much of anything concerning my own activity for the last month or two, here finally is my blasphemous Frenetic villanelle 'The Immortal Accursed' in the recent issue of "Mythic Delirium", amongst a wicked array of dark fantasy and horror:

http://mythicdelirium.com/mythic-delirium-2-3-jan-march-2016

Lecture at the Aldus Society, Columbus, Ohio

Last week I had the honour of traveling to my old haunt of Columbus, Ohio to give a presentation called Freed From a Parchment Jail about the Revenant Archive for the bibliophiles of the Aldus Society at the Thurber Center. I spoke about the first-generation avant-garde in the 1830s, using books from the archive as the guiding thread. I also had the opportunity to meet some intriguing bibliophiles and scholars, explore the Special Collections Library at Ohio State University, and catch up with some old friends and collaborators (though not everybody I'd wish).

Here is the announcement for the talk: http://www.aldussociety.com/Apr2016flyer.pdf

New Addition to the Revenant Archive: Bouchardy's 'Paris le Bohémien'

Another recent addition to the Revenant Archive: the script of the popular gothic play "Paris the Bohemian", written by the Bouzingo co-founder Joseph Bouchardy and published alongside its 1842 premier. For a full report, see the Revenant Archive update on it, HERE.

 Revenant Editions recently published Talia Felix's first English translation of Bouchardy's work, his short story 'The Garrick Remedy' (Read Here)

On Intellectual Culture and the Experience of Time

A remark by Baudelaire which haunts me: “I would gladly write only for the dead.” One could just as easily say: “…for the unborn.”

One result of extensive and passionate reading throughout early life, when the contours of subjectivity are being formed—and thus a pervasive trait within intellectual subcultures generally—is a radical relativisation of time as it relates to the subject: the visceral investment of that subject in historical time, with an integrality which most others seem to invest only in the lived time of their direct experience. Historical time, along with the forms of relation that traverse it, ceases to be experienced as abstract. In its most concentrated form, this investiture encompasses not only or primarily ‘the past’, but the unfolding of the historical process itself, and the potential-objects (one might say pataphysical objects, with the second word placed under erasure) that are imminent, or can be imaged as such, within a historical future. So that the epoch in which one lives—indeed, the conscious life one lives—is experienced less as a plenitude which ‘past’ and ‘future’ lack, than as a constraint against which one’s life continuously agitates. One’s literal life becomes analogous to the Ego of psychoanalysis: the active function of a subjectivity that indefinitely exceeds it. One ‘is’ whatever one’s work, one’s effect, will be, and whatever one has drawn into one’s self through it. Past and Future (with all the dissemenatory movement of the latter) become sites of the unconscious. This radical infusion of the process of subjectivity with the materials of social and historical process underlie the very possibility of  intellectual experience and culture. This state of existing lies at the root of the constant theme within the avant-garde of being at odds with one’s epoch, of being born too late or too early, jarring against one’s time—from Nanteuil, Bertrand and Gautier to Huysmans and Mallarmé to Hugo Ball. It is also what, in a sometimes stumbling manner, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and earlier Samuel Johnson and others in a certain British discourse were attempting to approach in their thinking on ‘fame’. 

Notes on the Emergence of Nihilism and the Yellow Sign

A series of displacements trace the progressive emergence of Nihilism from Philosophy: 

Operation #1: From Logos as origin to Logos as principle (Kant, Hume, Secular Humanism)

Operation #2: From Logos as principle to Logos as contingent projection or operative tool (by implication, subject as logos or unitary point) (Deism, Utopian Socialism, Bergson, Post-Levi Occultism)

Operation #3: Elimination of unitary subject as source or origin of this application (Artaud, Blanchot, Derrida, Kristeva)

Operation #4:  ?????????????????????

In terms of the corollary radical subjective praxis examined in The Ecstatic Nerve, one could indicate this progression from Blake and Nerval to Huysmans and Jarry to Schwitters.

The advent of the idea of the absent centre of the subject, and subsequently that of the absence or im-propriety of a 'centre' as such, is what opens the thinkability, and then the possibility, of the development of 'subjects' without biological properties or cognitive 'centres', subjectivities not founded in the experience of 'self' but rather exploring it as one articulation of a subjectivity whose defining experience is elsewhere. It is thus that the Yellow Sign has most generally been most effective or discernible when articulated or approached in relation to negative/nihilist/antiplatonic models of Thought.

Notes on the Real and its other

In its intelligent applications, Divination--whatever the degree of one's skepticism regarding its strictly 'predictive' action--puts into practice an understanding of the mechanism by which 'events' unfold in time; it is an art of asking questions, which in themselves constitute a field of contexts and themes within which the 'future', and the imminent events which are set into motion, will become manifest.

Magic seems to work best when one forgets it is occurring; the fantastic weaves itself into the same weft of impossibility through which the patterning of the Real itself is woven. Thus the reconception of ceremonial magic via techniques of devising (as of performance) on the one hand, and via the epistemological maleability of childhood play on the other.

The Imaginary vs. the Real object: fixation.
In the former, the 'Idea' that is being fixed is not proper, its form kaleidoscopically changing its aspect and articulation, the object itself so vibrant with significance as to compromise itself as object, sliding continually back half-way into the subject; in the latter, the object as object is persistent, truly fixed, whilst its implications are on the other hand held further at bay, qualitatively—as a fixed point in a fixed space, the object establishes the spacial terrain through which thought will articulate and organise itself.