73 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
73 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
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Bulletin #2
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"Since his death, Confucius has led a chequered career. Awarded the title
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of 'Duke' five centuries after his death, he lost it again a thousand years
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afterwards, only to be worshipped equally with Heaven four centuried
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later. After another century, he is being harshly criticized. No one knows
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what the future holds with regard to his reputation. True to his
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reputation for equanimity, he has not complained much about these
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reversals of fortune." (From DICTIONARY OF ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES by Stl
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Elmo Nauman, Jr. - Philosophical Library, 1978)
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THE SOLUBLE FISHERMAN; ( 11 November 1985) I admit my paranoia
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sometimes getrs the better of me. In connection with Tom Coffin, driving
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force behind THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, this has happened more than with
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most. Speaking of the sixties, he says, in Vol. 2, #4 of OPEN CITY; "I never
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felt personally that because we wore flowers in our lapels that meant we
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were the wave of the future." My first suspicion: This is a trap; he wants
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me to say: "What lapels?" How many even owned suits? And who doesn't
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wear flowers in lapels? And why does Tom Coffin, in everything he says or
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writes, always say something like that? And, yes, what lapels? #
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Jacques Baron on Andre Breton: "...this cold-blooded animal has never
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contributed anything but the rankest confusion to whatever he has been
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involved in." Andre Breton on the soldier as art critic: "...I cannot help but
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consider the constitution -- both of men and events -- of scientific
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socialism as a model school. As a school of an ever more profound
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understanding of human need which must aim, in all areas and on the
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largest possible scale, at finding satisfaction, but also as a school where
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each person must be free to express in any and every circumstance his way
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of seeing things, and must be ready to justify endlessly the
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non-domestication of his spirit." (Hear! Hear!)
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I found something at last in THE MANIFESTOES OF SURREALISM that I
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cannot disagree with -- except for some perhaps mischievously confusing
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rhetoric at the top of the second pate -- his address to Czhech
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Communists in 1936. On the whole it was a beautifully and untypically
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coherent statement -- with more than just the usual few brilliant
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quotable lines to recommend it, defining precisely his objections to
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Socialist Realism. The end for social organization to serve not, except
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incidentally, a means. Although there is a quote from Trotsky about
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winning bread and poetry. Thus Breton wound up much positioned as a
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physicist justifying pure research -- well and good as far as it went. Also
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by quoting authorities who denied, without evidence, that art is bourgeois
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propaganda, he weakened his argument. Art, as he points out elsewhere, is
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pressed into service of capitalist culture via co-optive methods
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(principally renumeration). It is a failure of socialism to wish upon it a
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similar role of servitude under socialist regimes -- resorting besides to
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even cruder methods. Liberating art from social co-option altogether
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makes sense in revolutionary terms. BREAD AND POETRY!
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-- Kerry Wendell Thornley 1986
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KULTCHA
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c 1984 Kerry W. Thornley
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Available Exclusively From
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Illumi-Net Computer Bulletin Board System
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(404) 377-1141
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