Editor’s note: Mar­cus Speh is a writer, ex-particle physicist, professor, executive coach, web head, father, fictionaut, former fencer and paratrooper, cur­rent maitre d’ of the kaffe in katmandu, curator of the One Thousand Shipwrecked Penguins project and mensch who lives in Berlin and blogs at Nothing To Flawnt.

**For a simply delicious audio version of the author reading this work, click here: Reading for Writers

READING FOR WRITERS

by Marcus Speh

Reading in your teens. Reading in your 30s and your 40s. Reluctantly reading in your 60s. Reading on your deathbed. Rigorous reading. Not reading for a week. Not reading for a year. Reading only what you like. Reading what you’d like to write. Reading very slowly. Reading very fast. Reading in another language you understand. Reading in another language you don’t understand. Reading aloud. Reading aloud but whispering. Reading aloud but shouting. Being read to by your mom or dad. Reading with a running nose. Running while reading. Reading as an actor. Being read to by someone you want to have sex with. Having sex with someone while reading. Making love to someone who is reading. Making love to someone who read your book. Reading to a revolutionary. Reading the news. Dozing off while reading. Reading to write. Reading with a respirator. Reading thoughts. Reading in someone else’s room. Reading in someone else’s bed. Reading for business. Reading to be well read. Re-reading. Reading in Reading. Reading while rolling. Getting paid for reading. Reading, then writing, then reading some more. Reading e-books. Racing your friend to the bookstore, then reading. Reading in a library. Reading the bible. Reading with writer’s block. Reading in prison. Reading the Kaballah. Reading your soul. Reading the fine print. Reading penguin tracks in the snow. Reading as if for the first time. Reading your work. Reading your face when you read this.

Mardi Gras 2011 falls on Tuesday, March 8.  Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, is the last day of the Carnival season as it always falls the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Here is a look back at last year from the lens and pen of New Orleans’ own KF.

THE DIVIDE

By Richard Godwin

There have been many debates about art and where it comes from and what rules govern it and at the end of the day maybe no one knows.

Friedrich Nietzsche posited the theory that it stems from a basic tension between the old Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, Apollo representing law and Dionysus chaos.

In his first seminal work ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ he wrote:

‘…we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself …first in the world of dreams, whose completeness  is not dependent upon the intellectual attitude or the artistic culture of any single being; and then as intoxicated reality…’.

This idea of intoxicated reality runs like an undercurrent through all the theories of creativity.

Rimbaud used it for his poetry.

Keats wrote of imagination that it was Like Adam’s dream ‘he awoke and found it true’.

There is a central issue of control.

If you paint with watercolour you have to let go of control, or you will paint shit.

The colours run.

That is why Turner is probably the greatest water-colourist and a great oil painter, he knew his media. He also cleverly created many paintings of the sea, which is fluid.

It’s like tipping the monster out of the pot.

The ego stands in the way.

What are you evoking?

During the 1960’s and 1970’s in the US a number of works were performed which transgressed the traditional boundaries of Western genre in the arts.

Jim Morrison urged his fans to ‘ride the snake’. Morrison also spoke of his reading in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ of the primal Dionysian art as the spirit of music.

Morrison moved his performances towards shamanistic theatre.

Interestingly Mircea Eliade, author of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy writes of shamans:

‘they express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled at some illud tempus of eschatology, and on the other, the coincidentia oppositorum in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine.’

Morrison’s ‘The Lizard’ took nearly half an hour to perform in concert and is an act of descent.

We’re into the underworld and back to the same divide.

Aristotle based much of his philosophy around a basic opposition and Alfred Korzybski, the Polish semanticist argues in ‘Science and Sanity ’ that mental pathology within Western cultures stems from a basic confusion of signifier with signified, in other words thinking that a table is identified with the verbal label we attribute to it.

He used to thump the table in his lectures and say ‘this is not a table’.

He also saw the basic either/or basis for Western thinking as its primary flaw.

Hegel moved it on in ‘Phenomenology of Sprit’ where he sought a unity stemming from the synthesis resulting from the uniting of his thesis and antithesis, although this may be a variation on the Christian trinity.

Like John Cage, Morrison was drawn to the Lord of Misrule’s carnival.

David Bowie said ‘I know one day a big artist is going to get killed on stage.’

Alice Cooper enacted much of the Dionysian on stage, throwing live chickens into the audience, axing dolls to death.

The acid trip, under the influence of Timothy Leary became a religious experience, a sign for the Trips Festival read: ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS A GOD GO UP ON STAGE.

There is a strong sexual element to this, as Euripides’s play ‘The Bacchae’ illustrates, Bacchus being the Roman version of the Greek God.

When Dionysus sheds Eros his energy turns negative.

He becomes the Devil, as Norman O. Brown shows in ‘Life Against Death’ as the form of excrement, waste and ‘filthy lucre’.

Then something happened at Altamont.

After Santana opened, a freaked out kid tried to get on stage. The Rolling Stones had hired Hell’s Angels as body guards, they dived into the crowd with five-foot pool cues.

While the Rolling Stones waited for darkness the Hell’s Angels taunted the crowd with contempt. Then they parodied the rituals of religious cults. In the words of Sol Stern, a former Ramparts magazine editor ‘ One of them, wearing a wolf’s head, took the microphone and played the flute for us – a screeching, terrible performance; no one dared to protest or shut off the microphone.’

Why?

Why didn’t they protest?

Because they were caught up in group psychology.

Why do leaders use it?

It’s good for business.

The Mediterranean wolf cuts and the flute music of Dionysus, the wild music of the joujouka – the vestigial music of the God which had entranced Brian Jones, Bryan Gysin, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles and Ornette Coleman – had come to this, a preparation for a star.

Into the darkness of Altamont, through the protective circle of the Angels on the blood-spattered stage, came the Stones, led by Mick Jagger in a black and orange cape and tall hat.

They played well but their music spoke out the interface between savagery and erotics, between the controls of art and the controls of magic, between Apollo and Dionysus. Jagger began ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ –  ‘They call me Lucifer and I’m in need of some restraint’. The earlier Angels’ attacks now climaxed. In the spotlights, when Jagger went on singing this number, they stabbed to death a black youth from Berkeley named Meredith Hunter. Panic-stricken Jagger tried to cool the screaming people, but the death ritual operated as part of his own performance.

The antithesis maybe at the root of art and sexuality.

Blood may flow from its veins.

Cultures create their own paradigms.

The scientists are the new priests if you believe in their religion.

Korzybski believed that hieroglyphic sign systems are healthier than ours because they use images.

Consider flint.

Strike it and there’s a spark.

We are as Shakespeare wrote in ‘The Tempest, ‘such stuff As dreams are made on; and out little life Is rounded with a sleep.’

This photo essay appeared on the original On The Wing, by Kristin Fouquet. In it, she explores the issue of graffiti and the arguments of art vs. vandalism.

Fellow artist and poet Tim Scannell passed away recently, after ten years of fighting cancer.

Many of us in the independent press, poetry, mail art, and other communities admired Tim as a man of creative energy, and a generous spirit. We were fortunate to run an interview with him at ARTERIALIZE last year, done by Justynn, and below is a repost  to honor Tim and the ways he touched so many lives.

Full Of Crow’s ARTERIALIZE Interview with Tim Scannell, December, 2009:

ARTIST STATEMENT

I enjoy creating things that people will not experience unless I make them. My fount (and font) is a plinth existing BEFORE GREEK CITY STATES (‘civilization’) – over 2,500 years ago – when mind lived in a ‘poetic’ realm: a surround of HER NINE YAKKING DAUGHTERS © of Mnemosyene and Zeus. Do look up the ‘nine girls’ – Calliope, Erato, etcetera. The political correctness of the present day, see my “Politics Kills Poetry” online, has destroyed huge swathes of what we once called called ART. The artistic challenge today is to connect the universal with the particular – see my essay on Robert Frost’s poem The Most of It (also online). My general philosophy, “Credo – Uncouched” is online too. I wryly adhere to Samuel Beckett’s adage, “The galley slave sticks to his oar.”

As a child, I filled scrapbooks with pictures from magazines (e.g., Collier’s, Look) – no spaces between them. In 1970 I began making montage/collage on 8.5 X 11 sheets of paper. In joining the mail-art world, I began making smaller works (postcard-size). I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of both sizes, and they are everywhere in the world…, from Uzbekistan to Japan to Australia and to most of our U.S. States.

Ironically, the only exhibition I have had of my work (about 50 or 60 examples) is in Priboj, Serbia (Feb/March, 2009) arranged by an Art professor, NeŠic Dragan (Galerija “Spirala”). The Serbian artist made a presentation and a TV station presented the exhibition on a little program. I’ve had no formal training, but admire the work of Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, Grant Wood, and most of the Romantic Landscape painters of the 19th century. I also love clip-art and magazine illustration wherever I find it.

First, the notion of ‘simple’. I think simple is a pretty good basis for ART. Oscar Wilde said, “Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.” For example, though I really enjoy Surrealism and Dada, they are actually patina and white noise that substitute for timeless,ordinary verities: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man v. the gods, and man vs. himself. My format accepts these truths, but my emphasis is JUXTAPOSITION of imagery and symbol. My juxtapositions explicitly express conflict or harmony as functions of the four verities listed above. So why try to be ‘FAUX’ complex? Life is not complex!

My childhood scrapbooks disappeared. All my cuttings are now taken from second-hand magazines and paper ephemera I find in antique shops; fodder sent by fellow mail-artists; pencil/pen/crayon and – of course – duct-tape, clip-art, stickers and occasional ‘found’ objects. I have several boxes of scissored snippets from all my used sources. I refuse to buy new magazines, when I can get them for a quarter or fifty cents at thrift shops.

Well, I like ol’ Max Ernst, but ‘wherever they fall, that’s where they stay’ is actually obviated by biases in pre-selection of materials. No one – ever – lives in a vacuum! Regardless of protestation, all art is calculation! As mentioned, all my visuals are from second-hand magazines and other paper ephemera. I use card stock for postcard montages, and regular copy paper for my 8.5 x 11 works. I usually riffle through several of my shallow boxes of rough snippets (pencil boxes are great because they don’t get too FULL), and select 20-30 eye-catching pieces for that day. I wind up using 5 to 15 pieces for each work. I always go from left to right – dunno why! Lengthy straight borders are made with a clear plastic ruler and an Exacto-type knife; otherwise, everything is scissored. The glue stick is better than any liquid glue because it does not ‘bleed’ through and causes no ‘wrinkling’. I scissor all materials to get rid of unwanted background and to ease desired juxtapositioning. I will ‘fill’ blank spaces with colored pencil, crayon, duct-tape or kinds of cross-hatching. All my collages are covered with a clear, adhesive shelving-paper (DUCK, clear laminate: 36 feet x 12″) – a Wal-Mart purchase which inexpensively covers my single-layer collage surfaces, protects during mailing, and prevents additions or emendations by anybody.

I have written poetry over 50 years now, have over 1,300 publication credits. As an editor who corrected and selected from over 10,000 poems submitted to my poetry zine, Muse of Fire, I do have what one can call…, a ‘very practiced’ application of words. I use word and poem to comment on juxtapositions, images – to add irony and satire, to jab against political correctness, or just to waft on a complementary layer of beauty. Remember that I stick to what is ‘simple’; as John Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”