Uncanny Reservoir

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Newspaper Reviews from Around the World

"There will be no shortage of men of good sense who will no more tentatively sip these audacious aesthetic promises. For this you can blame or praise according to your own inclination towards Dadaism and its disciplines. It is no bad thing to have a hobbyhorse. And it is excellent that the young Dadaists should be to the fore of this baggage train. There are enough of the old guard bringing up the rear. Let us just recall the official imbeciles who heartily mocked the precursors of the Symbolists and the Impressionists. Let us admire excess: it is the sign of health. It is the sign of youth."

L'Eclair (Paris).

[feral-ballad]

Kaveh Akbar, from Calling A Wolf A Wolf: Poems; “Heritage”

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Newspaper Reviews from Around the World

"Perhaps the best approach is to examine Dadaism from the point of view of our knowledge of psychology. This will enable us to choose between too many vague explanations.

'Dadaism,' wrote Huelsenbeck, one of the leaders of the movement, 'is the first cry of the new-born Dada. We are no longer wet-nurses, but bards who wish to begin everything anew.'

This perfectly lucid explanation reveals a tendency which is well-known in psychology and has been defined as regression towards childhood."

Comoedia (Paris), 1920.

[metamorphesque]

― William Saroyan, The Reformer

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"The Dadaist treats such problems as death and the erotics of love with gentile conciliation. According to him, however, such esoterica are out of place in people's minds. But even on this point he would basically be prepared to reach an accord.

The Dadaist has come to terms with life and the world. He has been in accord with them some 50% of the time. He passes through this world as a "distinguished foreigner," a camel-hair sports cap on his head, holding binoculars and recording his percentages in the "FANTASTIC PRAYER-BOOK" in sleek Palmyran ciphers. If worse comes to worst, then he relentlessly devours pork hocks in Madeira.

For suicide he merely lacks the motives. (That's all he needs!)

He won't admit that human beings have any good qualities except those he discovers for himself.

The PHILOSOPHER'S STONE that blocks his path is a weight off his mind."

Daimonides, from Towards a Theory of Dadaism

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"I keep walking as the light drains from the sky. Within minutes, the whole world has closed its eyes on me."

Carmen Maria Machado, Blur

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“[M]ythology shows an awareness of the nature of the various tasks : research proper brings into play clockwork-like mechanisms and has its seat in a wholly material organ which is monstrous only by its cybernetic complication; discovery, on the contrary, has a magical essence, it is simple like a basic element, a principial substance, like the philosophers’ stone of hermetists, tar-water for Berkeley, or oxygen for Schelling.”

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, The Brain of Einstein

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“The postmodern Apocalypse is ubiquitous but invisible. [...] We cannot escape its overwhelming pressure, but we also cannot grasp it directly. It is happening now, but so subtly that we confuse it with everyday life; or else it has already happened, but so overwhelmingly as to have wiped out our memories of what things were like before.”

Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols