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The Difficult Beginnings Of A Superstar

An ancient symbol of war, because of its reddish color, Mars started with a low profile in the gallery of inhabited worlds. Up till the 19th century, it could bear no comparison with the Moon. In his Itinerarium exstaticum (1656), Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) proposed

Playing With The Past

A Word with Two Meanings We invent words, then let ourselves be subjugated by them. There would be no knowledge without words, but it is words again that grow into independent entities, obstacles that come between us and the real world. They move us closer to and at the

The New Man

An Individual without Individualism To a new society – a new man. Naturally, one would not fancy a communist world inhabited by middle-class people in disguise. That was the most delicate problem raised by transformist mythology. One could not rebuild the economy and

The End Of The World. History Without an End

The 1900 Crisis The Break By 1900, no more bets. Pessimism. Denial of progress, return of the cyclic history. Social conflicts. Revolutions. Decline of the West and the yellow peril. Anti-utopia. The Great War. Abstract art. Earthquakes. Halley's comet. The end of the

The Eroticized Universe

The Bucharest Surrealist Group1939-1947* […] Madness, black humor, dreams, eroticism, revolt: if one cannot speak of Unu (One) and Alge (Algae) as surrealist magazines in the strict sense, these themes indicate however the increasing attraction of a number of Romanian

For Writers Are All Jesters, And All The Jests Together: Literature

For writers are all jesters, and all the jests together: Literature  In the history of literature, Tristan Tzara is regarded as the founder of Dada, an international literary and artistic movement, born in Zurich in 1916, with ramifications and outposts across three continents.

The Dialectic Of Dialectic

A Message to the International Surrealist Movement  We address ourselves to our surrealist friends scattered all over the world and, as in great shipwrecks, we indicate to them our exact location, at latitude 44° 5' North and longitude 26° East. The inexhaustible

Medium

(excerpt) (…)Utility, beautiful, good, value – what are they good for? We only have to strip the object of all these cretinized uniforms. Sometimes I catch myself providing it with them. Then the object looks crippled, fettered. The force of habit, this idiotic habit

1940-1947. The Romanian Surrealist Group

The message addressed to international surrealism. Theoretical contributions and techniques proposed by the Romanian surrealists Between 1938-1940, two young Romanian poets, Gellu Naum and Gherasim Luca, were in Paris – Naum to study philosophy, and Luca as the precarious

Yesterday Will Be Another Day

I wonder if nature always plays the same game (Einstein) Of course I was coming from sleep, how else is a day supposed to start? However, I didn't know much about the world I was coming from. On the other hand, the world I had landed in should have been very familiar

The Book Of The Millionaire: I. The Book Of Metopolis

(from: Chapter 5 - The Map of Metopolis Scaled 1:1; Chapter 4 - The Rail Car of the Millionaire, and from At the Armenian's Tavern and Once Again at the Armenian's Tavern - Chapters 3 and 6) If you are far, far away from the city and take a completely different

The Impossible Oasis

The wire that I had failed to see hit me below my knees. The earth turned, the boles propped against the stars somersaulted and I no longer heard the whistles. The red bells started to toll. Whipped up by the rain, the smell of weed and death that had simply been the breath