Raqs Media Collective

This is from a novel, "The Ragged Trousered Phillanthropists" by Robert Tressel. First published in Great Britain by Grant Richards, 1914, and Lawrence & Wishart, 1955. Tressel is his pen name, from the trestle table, part of the basic equipment of house painters and sign writers. It's a novel which is introduced with Tressel's lines: "this work which must be done or I will die in the work house". He submitted it to several publishers, but because it was handwritten, the publishers returned it without reading it. The book wasn't published till three years after his death - he died at 40 of tuberculosis - but hasn't been out of print since.

The novel is about a group of painters and decorators, and their families, in Hastings (Mugsborough), around 1906.

This extract is from page 46.

[thanks to Shveta for finding and sharing it.]

to think about past and future: (reminding of angels and farces)

McLuhan quotation:

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look
at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land."

(The Medium is the Massage, 1967)

"The role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of our civilization."

Rummaging in wikipedia, and think that these make for a good perspective on doing and thinking:

Meaghan Morris, from King Kong and the Human Fly

"de Certeau's move from summit to street involves a troubling reinscription of a theory/practice opposition - semantically projected as 'high' versus 'low' (elite versus 'popular', 'mastery' versus 'resistance'), 'static' versus 'dynamic' ('structure' versus 'history', 'metanarrative' versus 'story'), 'seeing' versus 'doing' ('control' versus 'creativity', and 'power' versus 'know-how') - which actually blocks the possibility of walking away at all. In fact, de certeau's visit to the World Trade Center is a way of mapping all over again the 'grid' of binary oppositions within which so much of the debate about structuralism was conducted."

This is something that can be found on many places online, but nevertheless:

Susan Griffen tells a story about surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who was imprisoned in the Nazi death camps:

One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly a Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.

The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative in their movements. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed. Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others.

Have you heard of Michael Moorcock? He imagined a character called Jerry Cornelius in the late 60s - a kind of maverick assassin responding (in sometimes surrealistic, sometimes almost analytical fiction) to the political and imaginative crises of the times. Interestingly this character became someone that lots of other writers took on (basically in the New worlds magazine) and he became for each author something the same yet something new. sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes straight, sometimes gay, sometimes fat, sometimes thin. etc etc. (but always the fascination for cars :-)) These stories seem to have been written way beyond the 60s (dont know till when, maybe till fairly recently) and i am reading a compendium of some of them. Many of them are almost incomprehensible since they write in such a personal language (very very trippy!) but still quite fascinating to see the kind of dark and morbid fantasies of society that reflect quite directly on politics (unlike most speculative or science fiction that often relocates to new worlds or new time).