THE ORGONOME

THE HOUSE OF FOURIER-SADE

I realized a curve was nothing less than an isosceles and your feet are turning into hooves to go with the thought. Along that underwater turmoil coiling out with your sudden emergence as a mountain, the steps are seething with wry tentacles, capturing your feet in a crown plunge, into the crystal water bucket most defiant of gravity, the side-project of molecular adhesion and entropic metamorphosis. The streets never sit still when seen, but when they're intertwined with the deep limbic system in a monomania sure to emit contagious wildfire, this will inoculate with black humor against the murderous metrics and memetics. Open the door with laughter, levity frightens the lock. The House of Fourier-Sade gathers weaponized shadows.

FOUND OBJECT DISPLAY

CONVERSATION

"My past slips out a wormhole brain and stirs my limbic system so I can exhale like a horse"

"And dance forgetfully in spiral conch shell caves"

"Lining the cliffs by the ocean's bony phantasms"

"Where teeth rise to the top layer of soil"

"With a red wine laughter boat..."

"Racing the dusk."

"I'll wear electromagnetism, and practice levitation"

"Shrinking like a slug's antenna..."

"To hitch-hike on the cloth rays of wasabi engines."

NOISE WITH STRINGS AND OBJECTS

PARANOIAC FIGURE

ANDREW TORCH SHOW IN ST. LOUIS

I was able to briefly visit a small show of paintings, images and objects by Andrew Torch of the St. Louis Surrealist Group. It was held in a frame shop in St. Louis, where one room was devoted to paintings and objects. The most striking was a large painting ‘A Real Life Allegory...’' whose use of dense imaginative color commands the attention as ambiguous layers co-habitate in the substance of a seven-year process one can fall into. There was a box object nearby which created an optical synthesis through a special lens, as a bird-headed being lurked in the narrow box. A larger object-box featured elephants coming and going while the viewer found their eye and chin split up visually into a kind of humorous 'cubomania' when they looked into the system of relays within the box. I feel this may have helped provoke a dream I had later that night where it seemed I had another face, which I discovered in a mirror on a telephone pole near a house I lived in nine years ago. Another object at the show which I enjoyed featured an antique clock infiltrated by a small di. The random factor of chance is 'salt' in the wound of linear time. I also couldn't help but wonder about the old heating vents in one corner of the floor, beneath a wire grate. What sort of experience could happen down there, I thought quietly.

FRANKLIN ROSEMONT 1943-2009

I want to take a moment to honor Franklin Rosemont who died on April 12th. I first encountered his writings in Arsenal #4 (Black Swan Press, Chicago: 1989) around 1991. Although I had read Breton's Manifestos of Surrealism and a handful of other works that were translated into English, I was not aware that the Surrealist Movement still existed in our era. After seeing parallels between surrealist poetry and my internal experience I tried to find everything I could that appeared in English, and Franklin's works were some of the most interesting and well-researched. In a period when too many works about surrealism in English were poisoned by falsehood and academic necrophilia, it was great to read Franklin's energetic and modern perspective that provided an aggressive counterpoint to the Salvador Dali imitators and the uptight art museum myopia. I have several signed copies of his books, including The Apple of the Automatic Zebra's Eye, Wrong Numbers, and Revolution in Service of the Marvellous, the latter two which he sent to the Portland Surrealist Group several years back.

My condolences and solidarity to Penelope Rosemont, the Chicago group and its affiliates.

A message from Inter-Activist Info-Exchange is reproduced below.

Franklin Rosemont RIP April 12th, 2009
David Roediger, Paul Garon, and Kate Khatib

Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.

Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area’s more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student movement at Roosevelt.

Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he had “majored in St. Clair Drake” at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics, and of historical scholarship—all concerns that would remain central for him throughout the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the United States later that year and founded America’s first and most enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of André’s writings in English.

Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964, and put his considerable talents as a propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press. A long and fruitful collaboration with Paul Buhle began in 1970 with a special surrealist issue of Radical America. Lavish, funny, and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow.

The smashing success of the 1968 World Surrealist Exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced the ability of the American group to make a huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the reorganization of the nation’s oldest labor press, Charles H. Kerr Company. Under the mantle of the Kerr Company and its surrealist imprint Black Swan Editions, Franklin edited and printed the work of some of the most important figures in the development of the political left: C.L.R. James, Marty Glaberman, Benjamin Péret and Jacques Vaché, T-Bone Slim, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and, in a new book released just days before Franklin’s death, Carl Sandburg. In later years, he created and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the University of Texas Press, in addition to continuing his work with Kerr Co. and Black Swan.

A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington, and the historians Paul Buhle, David Roediger, John Bracey, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Rosemont’s own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspirations and results. Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers.

He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. Indispensable compendiums like The Big Red Songbook, What is Surrealism?, Menagerie in Revolt, and the forthcoming Black Surrealism are there to ensure that the legacy of the movements that inspired him continue to inspire young radicals for generations to come. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include Morning of the Machine Gun, Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra’s Eye and Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny artwork—to which he contributed a new piece every day—graced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions.

Indeed, between the history he himself helped create and the history he helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to write—about the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the US, or about the international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing through the Rosemonts’ Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones, Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching the next generation of surrealists worldwide.

TUNE IN TOMORROW

Daisy was shocked to set a small fire in the farmhouse just as Kevin was pistol-whipping Jeff. Edmund went into a rage and smashed the music box she was moving out of the mansion. After talking to specialists who had been knocked out for his latest project, Stephanie had second thoughts about nearly making love with Maxie. She had to have blood tests when Philip arrived home and said she received a job offer from the Vancouver Opera House.

--Collaged elements of a newspaper soap-opera TV guide column

AQUA LIZARD TREE

AORTA CLOWNS

Aorta clowns, aorta clowns, I know
Then laughter will have a place to go

A limbic owl twists the
Leaping tornadoes of chance
The glass bell of my mouth

Palindrome feet in a mongoose cha-cha

Aorta clowns, aorta clowns, I know
Then laughter will have a place to go

(song lyrics)

DIFFERENT DRAGONS

With its newspaper and the factory
this expression of the adapted vacation
the solar earth
running parallel to it

The most serious city isn't done with different dragons within it.

The daydreaming was a strong, naive alleyway with restored laughter and characteristic corals.

Behind the ultra-jovial water sleeping with birds is a mischievous destiny. The remains of a small crowd.

The path to instinctive trenches is now merged with the ordinary sensation of convulsions.


--Chance dowsing from The Exteriority Crisis: From the City Limits and Beyond (Ed. Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro, Bruno Jacobs; Oyster Moon Press, 2008).

THE TRANSPARENT AURA PRIOR TO COMBUSTION

THOUSANDS OF SHOES TIE UP TRAFFIC (dedicated to the Surrealist Group of Madrid)

Miami--State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic. Lt. Pat Santangelo said the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes friday morning.
Santangelo said he's not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash, and no one stopped to claim them. He said he hopes someone will take them because he doesn't want to send them to the dump.
Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be removed.

--From Associated Press

NOMMO HEART

THE PHENOL KYLIX

Iron pyrites' monanthous lymph emulsion stashes the modular hippocampus and fickle pyramids germinate belligerent lorgnettes. Quinic acid sparks a phenol kylix whose masks coarctate obverse prefixes tempting lucent nostrums' osmosis. An umlaut neuritis slides ticklish walls within parrotfish fractions.

--From dictionary dowsing experiments

OUT OF THE WAY AVENUES

Some ways I've tried to engage the world lately involve moving found objects around the city during walks and bike rides, and exploring long overgrown alleyways in the north and northeast parts of Portland. The alleyways cut through backyards and there are various points of interest, whether it be overhanging tree limbs obscuring the path, a broken down car that may have been someone's bedroom, cats, rats, possums, racoons, interesting piles of rubble, someone's trash, graffiti, overgrown weeds and crumbling concrete mixed with hard dirt trails, and so on. Some spots offer a feeling of clandestine passage due to fences and walls being on either side, and the glare of streetlights does not always penetrate. Thus the impromptu life of the city is shown in some of its aspects when one strolls through the out of the way avenues.

--From the 'Update' on the C.S.E. page

THE MASK BENEATH THE MASK

As I look at Halloween photos I can't help but feel a certain sadness at the lack of creative and dynamic interpersonal transformation in our society. People are glad to get away from their usual habits by dressing up in colorful, macabre, sexy or humorous costumes. Halloween is the one chance that consciously conforming people have to escape their own particular set of personal and social limitations, because 'everyone does it' and there's no risk in being stared at, insulted or rejected by those who are 'serious adults' in this world of capitalism, dispossession, and imposed identity. But what of the mask beneath the mask? When we stare at ourselves in the mirror after the costumes have gone to the landfill and the beer companies are that much richer, what mysteries lie beneath the apparently calm surface? Where can we express the feeling of having multiple personalities within us when things have returned to 'normal?' 'Humanity' is more often than not another mystifying abstraction that demands our fealty. If I want to be part bat, snake or frog, or even an atmospheric phenomena, who is going to play along? We have little room to develop ourselves beyond sanctioned pathways, and the superego has us on a chain called 'propriety and property.' Where does this reactive loop of domestication get broken other than in the customary alcoholic inebriation or in private hedonism? Beyond the frozen caricatures of our personalities we are still very much unknown to ourselves, and even afraid to admit it. The next time you see someone standing on the street doing nothing, remember--they could be shapeshifting while you shop.

Reality Overload

QUASIRETINA!

The catnip foils the red birdhouse, whose chest is a flat book astride two skateboards. Cords bubble into arrows, leopard print drapery gloves into the hazelnut wind, blue pushpin plastic alfalfa, coat-of-arms sill, bean jar 2.4 rumples photos. Dice pasta thread busts red doll hair, the moon above them a hat without a crown. Ferrite grain sand sparkles blue. Diameter down the window, a tilted face, echo of the 11:07 stuck watch.

Desert sand purple milk wheel, eaten armchair handles stuffed thread, zombie thread ragdoll worn edge. Glass echo honeycomb window, cap contains silver smell, jar teakettle. Biting apple Louie Louie on the telephone instructions, blue sand. Dry paper door open paper bird, window lock safety pin chain. Black surf squash left shoulders the away, three-eyed plug. A lens is held by three hands, in a circle.

--Semi-automatic text created by imaginative reverie upon things seen in a given area, a method otherwise known as SURROUNDS. Originally printed in Stronger Wine, Madder Music #1.

DESCRIBE A ROOM

(This is a variation on the exquisite corpse and was
played by two people. The only requirement was to
'describe a room.')

The room was a curious mix of heaving bronze
airplanes, miniature statues and newspapers that bore
only one word: MINT.
The couch was flanked by two pigeons that looked more
like peacocks. It felt like liver.
The lamps were made from frozen juice, slowly dripping
as they melted onto the carpet which was wearing
something completely inappropriate and kept inching up
on the snail chair.
The chair kept moving around whenever new guests
arrived. They'd come through the front door, a wild
looking meat hook that swung on its hinges exotically
snatching cherry ribbons.
Next to the door was a coatrack that said 'ouch' or
'mmm' when people put their coats and hats on it.

Shibek & Nova

MECHANICAL FETUS ATOMS

The act of dissappearance could be a matter of image changing modern animal prosperity, often invisible. The rhetoric assumes that a complex dynamic is a false statement. Empty choices--'everybody does it.' Point blank strategies of rigid obscurity give meaning to the formulas. This is because decreased wages are the most widely exported racket. An extra myth had to put mechanical fetus atoms of a contradiction to work.

People will be specialized whirlpool zones, where the initial barriers fall back on the rotten expansion of affluent confusion. The pressure consists of untrusting invitation ready to unify the limits of ultra-exact false fronts, when revolutionaries can be everywhere moving through innovative obscurity.


--Composed by chance methods from an older issue of Against Sleep and Nightmare.

THE PINPOINT OF SILENCE

Sight is the feeble moon eclipsed by encyclopedic clouds
The dictionary dominates the rate of pulsation
And sad worms ponder their spines in fright

This polarity sphere, a cognitive dome, is hunted by re-animated cloth
Worn by self important lips taller than the house of You

I'm sucked into the straw of raw globulin, a silver spark on my hand
Books make good ladders to reach the ears
Where the act of naming spells hypnotic futures
Unravelling ghost gutters with stellar marble skates

These iconic boards bend in magnetic heat
A trapped image shudders
A creeper rings the facial envelope
Drumming the horizon's square nettles
Into a splash of word circuits
Which form dense molecules stammering in restrictive cineplex mufflers
But no silence will dare sleep on the pinpoint
Which moments of censored glue fail to bind

Try as I may I cannot slide into this macabre footwear

BETWEEN HICCUPS AND OBLIVION

Attaining consequence is reduced to internal visions of a sonorous volcano which formed mucus glands. A final experiment can be entitled 'exploitation' as one of the forerunners of the deferred legendary formless. The attacks are attempting to follow a tendency to suffer from amnesia. Three days of this justification seemed like a lot of evidence. We feel a rejection reveals its true worth. If that were abandoned, an initial reading between hiccups and oblivion is therefore obliged to become more and more perilous.

An infatuation was raising a very high error, a description of the circumstances whose ruse is the very beginning. We have always been simply without mental reservations in this affair--a child under ten. I assure you, those in power because of elegant ulcers can be said to fit the criteria of didactic intention. This egocentrism is a vaunted dichotomy restrained and separated from the umbilical determinism.

Chance text collage

BLIND BREAKFAST DRAWING

While eating breakfast today I made two drawings with my other hand, without looking at the paper. Then I did a quick interpretation of each image. Here is the one I liked better:



Beehive hair and flying palm, she dances with a dense melange of an oil lamp, and crackling angles carry the charge of her internal wombat

SCHIZOTYPOGRAPHY

INTROVERTED ANHEDONIA

Galaxies' fingers suffocate my grizzled wasp, asp of a sudden lake spelling with a sedan the coiled letters of the sonic sun aimed at the heaving flame that drips across fasciculating mountains wrapped by snug time machine dust smashed into a net. Flinching elbows stain the ear plunged into a lime tree's how-to-do angina ripped wildly out of restless doors scored by mockery salt.

LABILITY OF AROUSAL

Smug advertisements for broken antennas cling to violent figs hurled into a treehouse where nosebleeds paint the lunar eclipse with bay leaves which are the clothes of a mandrake.

IDEAS OF REFERENCE

The static sea undulates with lyrical invocations to my infantile ribbons, olive eyes stung by robot news stuck in the exhaust.

CELIA GOURINSKY

I didn't know Celia Gourinsky, but I want to offer my condolences to the members of the Rio de la Plata group.

THE LIQUID MAGMA HEART

TELEPHONE TAG BLUES

Inspired by a video of George Melly making random calls from phone booths in England to recite poetic and humorous phrases, I decided to dial several completely random and probable 'wrong numbers' to ask if certain friends were at the place being called. I planned to improvise on the results, if there were any, but my first call went to an answering machine. As I was wanting to connect with a human being, I dialed another number which turned out to be the voice mail system for my entire high school. Thinking it amusing, I intended to leave poetic messages for an old teacher or two, but I was unable after several tries to enter a valid mailbox number. My third and final call was answered by a computer modem extending its screaming electronic palm towards my eardrum. I thought it oddly reflective of our times that I was unable to reach a single human being during this whimsical experiment in telephonic chance.

CHANCE DICTIONARY

A variation on Question and Answer or Definitions, but played using a single dictionary, or alternately, with one or more books.

Modern--of or like a lion

Shiite--an American shrub which bears small black or blue berries

Ratio--an organ of certain flowerless plants which bear reproductive cells

UNESCO--the state of being hypnotized

Prohibit--a cold blooded, aquatic vertebrate animal

Megalomaniac--insect, very destructive to wood

Lime--half light preceding sunrise

Legislate--a portion of a circle enclosed by two radii and the arc which they intercept

Warble--without form

Skeleton--a mercenary soldier who sells his services to any country

MAGNETIC SYRUP

If the heat lightning on your knuckles means cocoons will envelope your glass house, if rocks are laugh meters chummy with a tree vole, and if my hands are dynamos of strobe pools, giant trees carry magnetic syrup.

THE PRIME SLOUGH OF FROG DOUGH

As soon as my birch-leaf spine can finish with the muriatic cloud left boiling on a lash of wet silver coiled like a birth window over the prime slough of frog dough, half eaten by the outer eagle of toy beds, it will be one who walks with a secret ear to seek out and neutralize yellow wallpaper fads in glaciers where revelation animates the spider's green and white glove worn by the cloth panther.

THE SOMNAMBULIST FOOTPRINTS

The Somnambulist Footprints is the result of a collective project in which several contemporary surrealists and fellow travelers wrote short stories according to their own interests and imperatives, based on their common desire to subvert the very foundations of conventional reality, both on the written page and – more importantly – beyond it, in the open space of consciousness.

Contributing authors: Mariela Arzadun, J. Karl Bogartte, Daniel Boyer, Eric W. Bragg, Mattias Forshage, Parry Harnden, Dale Michael Houstman, Philip Kane, Merl, Ribitch, Matthew Rounsville, Shibek, Andrew Torch, and Xtian. With illustrations in black and white. Edited and introduced by Eric W. Bragg.

This is the very first publication by Oyster Moon Press -- a non-profit, surrealist publishing co-op initiated in Berkeley, California.

AN AWESOME LOVE SCAM

If that running Jesus could try rat bambi's taxi theories on the bed, technically pig digits can't turn into a window. Wish I'd thought lazy dream ball instruments, 10,237 high noises on my first try, and the best course of action, my clones...it's your head out a window! So everything like this has been released on an unlucky day. Meanwhile, I feel that sort of thing to be a surprise. An awesome love scam had never come to detention.

(semi-automatic word collage on the comics page)

PHILIP LAMANTIA

I want to take a moment to remember Philip Lamantia, who died three years ago on March 7th, 2005 in San Francisco. Lamantia's orientation, which included surrealism, poetic revolution, jazz, mystical/mythical heresy, and much more, continues to be inspiring.

SURREALIST EGREGORE

This blog strives to be a forum and archive for articles, events and creative material related to Portland, and for things of interest to me, with a nod towards surrealist experience and urban anthropology. It is open to other like minded contributors.

CAT IN A CAVE

PUPPET TEARS BOTHER THE CLEAN HOUSE

During screechy, unique, broken exploits, the cornstarch passion for bigger post-dance ferment is returning. Infamous arrows expand the tempestuous electric bedouin crocs. I lean ghost roses out of the shadow beating. They didn't know a generic rogue would love a priceless treacle wave.

The puppet tears bother the clean house. A few evenings later, gruesome uptight dummies closed the twenty-second floor lanes. Come make impossible sun characters--their secret desires inevitably pretended it was a death.

Fewer uphill hurricanes included the Negev desert into their injury lyric on her doorstep. The brief festival ends badly, highlighted by your deeply felt parade of fool's gold: brilliant logistics in predictable murders.

(Chance text dowsing on an entertainment weekly)

IN THE CASTLE OF CLAY CUPS

The Great Lakes are ambushed by an earthquake
A trembling visceral heatwave
In the castle of clay cups

Swallows wrap ribbons around the mountains
Their spider hands collapse mirrored dice

Ice appears on the old streets
The wild plants' invasion

Crazed ramblers of nepotism
Like falling glass


M.K. Shibek and Tim Iserman

SURROUNDS

The door of the left arm's eyelash nose and shoulder wisp the sigh of the right leg

Wrinkled loonies edge up from the crater 'neath a silver fish whose coal purple edge sets navel and breast 'gainst widge pugs


(text created through an imaginative reverie associating objects in the room with internal body states and subjective impressions)

PORTLAND SURREALIST GROUP DISSOLVES

The Portland Surrealist Group, founded in August 2001, dissolved on January 14th, 2008. Due to various internal situations we were unable to maintain a level of collective activity that was consistent over time, and this led to Brandon Freels resigning on January 13th. After further discussion FN Brill and I decided to disband the group. Much of the material that has been published at the Flying Stone blog and elsewhere will be printed and made available later this year.

I want to thank those who came to our meetings or pursued projects or friendships with us during these years (although such a list could never be complete): Victoria Garcia, Kaylene Chassie, Trillium, Rain, Ron, Dave, Chris Beavers, Paul Portugee, Sarah Frances, Andrew Daily, Christopher Gray, Trevor Blake, Anthony Leskov, Dave Negation, the Portland IWW, the Red and Black Cafe, the 411 Collective, the Portland Vadding Collective, Fifth Estate Magazine, Eberhardt Press, Doug Lain, Karl Lind, Apio Ludicrous, Ron Sakolsky, James Koehnline, Laura Corsiglia, Eric Bragg, Dale Houstman, Parry Harnden, Kevin Sampsell, Barrett John Erickson, Johannes and Anna Bergmark, Thom Burns, Nova Dawn, Tim Iserman, various cafe dwellers, passers-by, and other groups and individuals who wrote letters, sent books or showed support from the international surrealist community, especially the groups in Chicago, Stockholm, Leeds, London, and Rio de la Plata. Thanks to Zazie for hosting our first website.

The members of this nucleus will carry on surrealist pursuits in their own way. I may sponsor open meetings based on collective creation, reading circles, and experiments in the street in hopes of sparking a new group activity. Also, sound experiments with Qkcofse are providing an element of improvisation and collaboration that's in the spirit of surrealism, so those will continue.

M.K. Shibek

STRING GLASS ECHO

Without a shrug of bushes intent on rousing the string
You'll be a whisper in an engine room's glass echo

Without a parcel of ice-faced bunnies
Taken from the shelled ribbon plant
You'll be a frozen rose in the noon's telescope

SOLAR ENVY

About my curious gold sunglasses

There may be a 'flaw' in the design
Because when I happened to wear them
Outside at night
A tiny flame danced above distant lamp-posts
An orange tint, half a halo
As if to echo the envy these lights must have
For the sun
Its visual echo in negation-dynamic tension mobiles

These ironic echoes at night of the sun dancing atop lamps
They tell me something about the unconscious of envy

Above distant lamp-posts an arterial sclerosis

At night's glove the fingerprints ignite optical almonds

DUST STORM OVER THE EQUATOR

High above a beam of red light
at other mist-wrapped sore feet
a chew is enough

Light in my head
a light of glass buttons
melted heaps slither in a wormhole sahara

Heat bubbles of a dust-storm break over the equator

The oak ventriloquists' aerosol words the second halo of moon ice

MEANING THROUGH CHANCE: SUREALIST GAME

This is a surrealist game of creating meaning through chance. Take five books that are important to you in some way, make a wish while holding them, then open the top book. With as little delay as possible, select a short phrase that your eyes fall upon, then open the next book and do the same. When you have done this with all five books, start over in reverse order. Catalogue the results by placing the selected words for each book on a separate line, and break off the paragraph after the fifth line. Complete the process five or six times, or carry on as long as you like. Share the results, or not.


WILL NOT MARRY OUTSIDE ITSELF


TO JOIN THEORY WITH PRACTICE
CAUSE AN OBSERVER TO FORGET HER AGE
IF THE ‘AESTHETIC STATE’
OF HIS OWN HEAD
SHOULD HAVE NO PLACE

THE FATHER AND MOTHER
FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW
IN SO FAR AS
INTERSPERSED WITH OATHS
TO THIS SORT OF ILLUSION

THIS PENCHANT MANIFESTS ITSELF
AND ADOPT A DOCILE ATTITUDE
THE LATTER MAY BECOME FREELY ADAPTABLE TO CULTURE
BETWEEN THE TWO SCRIPTURES
THE FIRST OF THESE FACTORS

THE GREAT ACTIVITY
SHALL SEE VISIONS
TRANSFORMATION IS THE ISOLATED DEED
THE SEVENTEENTH DAY
WILL HEAR THE ORCHESTRA

PROBLEMS OF EQUILIBRIUM
A DISCUSSION WHICH COULD LEAD US FAR
AS THE ARENA
WE BECOME HIS BODY
A FEW MORE PSYCHIC PECULIARITIES

IT IS TRUE
THE ENORMOUS IMPORTANCE
WITHOUT EXTERNAL REPRESSIVE MODIFICATIONS
WOULD PERHAPS HEAR THE CALL
WILL NOT MARRY OUTSIDE ITSELF

10-07

With Fourier, Sade, Marcuse, O.Brown and Freud, in hopes of creating a harmonian cylinder

WHITE NOISE DOWSING

A few days ago I was using a computer program to generate brown, pink, and white noise for experimental sound composition. I saved a twenty second segment of white noise as a seperate file and soon listened to it turned up loud in the headphones. I made random loops out of the noise, and found a few paranoiac* statements in the mix. These were distorted, humorous and interesting phrases, spoken with curious timing in a metallic, static-filled voice. Among them were "pleasure the flesh," "please take my fleas," "write, wield the quill," and "g'mornin." I saved each voice to later play to friends, so that their own paranoiac mechanisms might be exercised. It will be interesting to see if they hear what I heard, or if some other revelation will stumble out of the rumbling texture for them.

*'Paranoiac' refers to a phrase which means 'delirium of interpretation.' This phenomena has been written about by Leonardo DaVinci, Salvador Dali, and others.

WHAT IS SURREALISM?

This link, when copied and pasted into a browser window, will take you to an article by a Swedish comrade which plays with the question "what is surrealism?' I found it a well-developed and intriguing statement which, despite its lucid quality, is still somewhat tentative. Such efforts to re-contextualize the evolving 'open system' which surrealism is have my support as important gestures against the widespread confusion and popular mediocrity that has influenced the way 'the public' uses words. Plus, it is always interesting to see surrealists and their friends put forward just what a surrealist praxis is, for them.

http://icecrawler.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-is-surrealism.html

MAY 1954

Her desire to introduce freedom does not place against its arrival external impressions of use receiving exhausted delight. To retain it, her enigmatic nature--with a bit of ribbon--may seem once more in the street, but inside things and people. Then, language is transformed into gravitations dedicated to my forehead. The hand is waiting to fall to the ground in May, 1954.

BEYOND THE WANDERING ATMOSPHERE

The human hope in favor of bias had involved them towards necessity--perhaps more spectre with whole headache theory quarter. Seductiveness remained, because the ego finds yet another function on a glass birdcage trick in logical limits' mistake beyond the very wandering atmosphere.

These difficult newspapers become exterior lanes to the torrid finger signs one may obscure in discoveries. To resist fake purpose, a curious man was widely about. Nothing intricate was seen, however, until many thousand roosting idiots issued from the smaller mouth.

Only in the visual phrase, in the absence of thinking, will the lost spool clearly be able to change the night. Forces erupt for a number of reasons, if one may speak, as interior fact attuned to contradictions guided by objective black humorists finds ferocious treats to destroy.

--Dice game played with three books, July 2007

THE COCHLEA DIMMERS

The water harp ears like a steamed cornea through blasting cap toupee. Crab pelvis solar dungeons play the dusk trumpet. The empty shapes jamboree boulders, river's tongue on sound-spoon. The cochlea dimmers humpily swoon with a wet laugh.

CHANCE DICTIONARY

These definitions were created using one translucent blue di and two dictionaries. Questions came from the first, and answers from the second, dictionary. The length of the answers were guided by the number rolled on the di.


What is marginal?
A nondescript game bird.

What is phrenology?
Druid misty in extremis enthrall cover.

What is a splint?
Floruit ram hauetur doorbell.

What is gumption?
Headgear flip flop comparitive prepossessing sperm.

What is private?
Marram grass sitar nitrite hysteric.

What's a raindrop?
Snook ordinance inflation gait.

APOSTASY GULLET

I stir the apostasy gullet with lucid morphemes

A compelling face of love's electric cartwheel dramas

Blood slums' captive stations mix cherry angles with
Radio coils under a hat of seeds

The iron-throated vesicle crumbling lead lips

A WANDERER'S HEART

A Wanderer's heart
and the open cage
are able, sometimes,
inside your eyes
at dawn
to wave myself

Remaining a dead sanctuary
in a rose among the future
executions
with red, lazy vines

A rising stone in full flight
stops untouched shoulders
from shelling rare roots
in river mushrooms

--Chance composition from Selected Poems of Li-Po, Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, and Everything You Know Is Wrong

SWARM CONTEST

The lightning open door cow wolves laugh shattering tubas with lace. The sea slithers across deserts; a whistle rises and falls like a snow pony. Straws ejaculate iron discs; love runs into gravity in a swarm contest. Heavy feet ignite sandstorms. A blanket falls over the flowerbeds. Bells eat sound empty. Open mouths lurk where a sled track disappears. It gets quiet as a dust tunnel filled with old books.

CAKE BONES

Between ears of a river and legs of a mountain,the skyline has a see-through crowd. Burnt notes crawl out ignoramuses. Statuesque ribbons percolate faintly. Tongues dance. Frenzied cake bones slump into a giant brace holding aloft the bitter galaxy. A glass bubble hangs over lenses whisking lakes away. Celebrations of musk siren out from a hollow tree's placenta dome.

ORACULE

What's my current mood?
Rainwater

What's a dance?
Pied-a-terre*

What's my secret name?
Telemetry

What is a kiss?
Voluminous



What's a penance?
Theology

A footprint?
Specific

A neighbor?
Sunshade

Oakum?
Yeast

Systole?
Felicitous

A phylum?
The Id

A tendril?
Iron oxide



What is surrealism?
Raft*

***** ***** *****

These texts were created by playing question and answer with a dictionary. A rapid scanning of the pages sometimes sparked a rapport between words and phrases. I also selected words from the dictionary and then let the dictionary 'answer.' Only the more interesting results have been recorded here.

1) Pied-a-terre, French; literally, 'foot to the ground', also a temporary or second lodging

2) After 'what is surrealism,' I added more entries by continuing to scan pages. The fourth word in the answer was 'realism.'

RELAUNCH ASLEEP

Relaunch asleep. Curity and Manatee goss, stunned particles yawning potion. Asiento gas house. You'll eat your head full of cherry trees, with a ducks' eye. Comets slash silk windows. Burning weights slip into a pool.

STORM SLIPPERS

To dance storm slippers, harangue a sun wildly during a volcano walk, and move like a steep ocean breathing out hair into the trees, in a transparent garment of force. It's enough to wing ankles. Sonar bubbles are densely clanging amid raised notes' combustion.

THE END OF THE NINES

Eventually the nines will run out and your peers will catch a train to express-way 100. Cool a baboon's heart by aimless soothing cones. Cinders' glue famish a dump of bones, life's convex mirror of blood luck.

TRANSPARENT OWLS MINISTER TO THE DANG POPPINS

Gripping cracked paint into each knee

Nine brooms weep yetis tomorrow

Seven dustpans cringe ostrich smoke

Dove throat incensed at yarrow foundries

Oaks hosting xenon rays

OTHER ISLES OF SWAMP

How could brittle forms
sleep after a hazard?

Other isles of swamp,

I'm in love with walking moss...

An afterthought--

To smelter some heard tidings.

My short walk to a bridge,
plaza of arcades.

NEW LOVERS DESTROY OPINIONS

"New lovers destroy opinions."
"The workers' routine is a pale satellite.
Compulsion today extends the universal police force."

"I will not become nothing. What I want would have made rain:
Botanists hurled against savage masques."

NOCTURNAL CITY FOXES AND BIRD INSECT ALBUMS

Two things in an interview with sound improvisor Evan Parker struck my antenna:

1) The discussion of foxes being active in the city at night. This reminds me something emphasized by Morgan during a Portland Surrealist Group meeting-- that creatures are here in the city making their own space and that this could be looked at in a surrealist light. Articles on the Flying Stone Blog (http://pdxsurr.blogspot.com) reflect on some of these matters (see Interview with Morgan Miller; Base Poetics; Paranoiac-Critical Coyote).

I'm enlivened by encounters with night creatures in the city, though these are usually brief compared to the experience of the Trafalgar foxes. This brings to mind a possible future inquiry on human-animal relations within the city as experienced by surrealists. For my part a squirrel recently ran up to a friend and I while we were walking by a cafe, paused by our feet, then climbed on my knee as I knelt down. The squirrel made eye contact, then jumped on my shoulders for a few moments as I stood up, before calmly wandering down the other side of my body.

2) Insect sounds have given me hypnotic memories from childhood visits to my grandparents' backyard, where cicadas began their pulsing drone at dusk. I would find and sometimes collect their pristine, translucent shells, left clinging to the bark, when I climbed trees.

*


Monastery Bulletin: What's that squeaky sound? You got a pet mouse in your pocket or something?

Evan Parker: No, it's the woodwork, the bench...

(The next minute of the recording is drowned out by the noise of the coffee machines being cleaned with high pressure vapor.)

MB: Are this kind of sounds especially interesting to you as a musician, daily life sounds?


EP: Oh, I think I've got an ear for - maybe a bird sound, or some mysterious sound in the middle of the night. Maybe foxes. We have foxes, a lot of foxes, even in the city, because of all of those little gardens and cemeteries, the foxes find it easier to live in the city now than in the country.


MB: Maybe because there's no fox hunting in the city! We had a very close encounter with a fox at three in the morning on Trafalgar Square...


EP: They've moved in. And they're very relaxed, and more and more cool now. More at night of course than in the daytime. But you see them in the daytime sometimes. The later in the night, the more confident they become. It's like they're asking you: what are you doing up at this time? This is our time! And they stand there, they don't run away anymore. (The squeaking sound catches our attention again. Evan shifts back and forth to get some more signal.) Yeah, you're right, it's coming from here. Nice little squeaks.


MB: Sounds more like a cricket now... Do you feel a kinship with the music of insects? Some of your records have been favorably compared to insect twitterings.


EP: There's fantastic recordings from this French guy, Jean Roché, and he's for years been making recordings of bird songs from all over the world, but also sometimes insects. So there's some very good records of cicadas and crickets and... This guy started in the age of LPs, and he had various series. So some of them were edited like concerts. Some were more like classic species identification, so each track was to identify a particular species - or a survey of a particular region. And then when he liked a particular individual bird, then he would make an EP and say: this bird is a virtuoso and must be featured as an individual, this is beyond the generic or the species type, this is an individual bird with a very special - so he did a very interesting series of records, and gradually they're being transferred to CD. And also now he has younger people working, making new recordings with digital recording. It's a lot easier to do now than in the old days, going to the jungle with an analogue tape recorder.

* The longer interview this excerpt came from can be found here, under the sub-title 'Shopping with Evan Parker.'

http://www.monastery.nl/bulletin/

THE TIME OF CROWS

The time of crows for mixed bales
Each roll of scarecrow hexes
Sunlight elopes with bland hollows thrown to a wet eclipse
Nicety digits have hidden relays of streaming silk dust

Call across the water to move a moon
I'm a spark of thought, baby shale

The codex of mingling slips its head into floating envelopes
tearing gumbo trees in its Ming dynasty library

The shovels of rain, liquid teeth

Evolutionary mechanism ice pallor
follows the changed shirt

SURRATIONAL DIALOGUES

SURRATIONAL DIALOGUES:

Two or more people sit in a quiet, pitch-black room. The chance of habitual retinal and sonic impressions overshadowing inspiration is lessened in the dark, in the quiet that often only arrives late at night. There may or may not be instrumental music or flashes of light depending upon personal preference.

The people may use a lamp timer or other instrument to mark the end of each exchange or session by turning on the lights. They can set a timer for one minute or each person can turn on a light when the time seems right to them to do so. The goal of the experience is to record a surrational dialogue within a given, or random, duration of time. The following 'dialogue' is excerpted from my automatic writings to serve as an example of surrational communication in real-time. Very little conscious planning was involved in selecting the words.

This could also be undertaken by a single person, alone in the dark, as a 'self-dialogue.' The free-wheeling intimacy and unusual appeal of such an outpouring of 'the quantities of excitation' could spark a resonance with the hypnagogic, experiential regions that are often denied reciprocation by the social context.

A:
Made flux by wet lives,
this shape is a falling arrow.
The wind is in a tower.

B:
Gruesome tungsten okra might be served.

I broil the corners' laughing soap kites.

A:
Heights of stone stairs, take away my rushing bubblegum.
The heart-beats of imps call out to fabled trees.

B:
With water-oags, my neck-boating class,
row-row-row your boat of ice.

A:

Where your hype ladder is boxed in lion traps,
the pretense of bat choruses' silver flame.

B:
Scared of aluminum noise, cats reach for bums,
weave in and out of a slow pony. Flat mountains
don't exist.

A:
Somehow they do, in mustard clangs.

B:
Pronto is the paper ghost--search for letters to suit the body.

JUNE 24TH DERIVE

In collaboration with the London Surrealist Group who
issued the call, and with other surrealists and allies
around the world.

On the way to my first point, I met a woman with
her face painted white, who was intrigued by the idea
of the derive, and by surrealism, though she said she
knew little about them. She said she'd try her own
version of the derive once I told her the coordinates
and then left an email address during the short bus
ride. I rode to a large mall. My intention was to
wander using the second right, second left, first
right formula from the point of repulsion to the
chance locale to the points of desire, but the
desiring space sometimes intruded into, or was found
alongside, the repulsive and the chanced upon.

From the food court to the video and gaming arcade I
went, talking into a tape deck. 'War: The Final
Assault' was a game which featured an instruction
label reading 'kill boss to complete level.' 'Wing
War' was a flight and driving simulation. 'Time
Crisis' was the last game I saw as I headed for a long
hallway across the food court. I couldn't help reflect
on the tone of video 'adventures' in light of U.S.
foreign policy and the narrow outlook which saturates
this land-mass. People stared at me as I talked into
the tape deck mic.

Following my guideline directions I arrived at a
hallway leading away from the food court. Past a sign
reading 'authorized personnel only' I went through
unlocked double doors, through a short hallway, and
out onto a rooftop area, deserted but for one car. I
could only go one direction down this path which lead
to the public parking lot. Soon I descended a white
steel staircase onto a boring street and saw my
initial point of entry into the mall in the distance,
farther away than I'd imagined.

Heading east, a sudden point of desire emerged in a
parking alley behind a chinese fast-food place. This
was a deserted area without a single car or person,
quiet, and partially in the shade. A row of pine
bushes towered above me to the left from where they
lined the edge of a higher lot. A bird flew by as if
to heighten the solitary feeling of being hidden from
view for a moment, away from the prying, judging eye
of 'the public' near the rush hour. Before I left this
spot I saw one pane in a large double-paned window had
been broken. It seemed no one would notice due to
piles of boxes just inside.

The alley continued across a busy street and past a
small building labelled 'The OOOption Group.' I'd seen
this sign before and it reminded me of the Romanian
Surrealists' 'objectively offerred objects,' which
helped to auto-mythologize the 'oooption group' into a
curious secret society in my imagination. This name is
also a mix of a mistake and a pathway, as in ooops and
options. A sign read 'these premises under video
surveillance' to top it all off.

Moving through an alley behind buildings, past
several 'permanently locked' doors and security
buzzers, I found myself taking the next available turn
into a kitchen and housewares shop. The air
conditioning, shoppers, jazz on the radio, and crying
baby inside were a sudden change, and with humor I
navigated the aisles and levels of this place until I
returned to my point of entry and then set off in
another direction. I wondered when I would be asked if
I could 'be helped' but by then I'd made an exit past
the patio umbrellas onto a boring, hot and busy
street.

A series of giant, locked doors blocked the next
intended turn, and left an uneasy impression. Past the
Epicure restaurant I found an abandoned computer by a
dumpster. A single sheet of paper lay in the
landscaping--an invoice for tropical plants, 'and a
bow' as someone had written in ink next to the print.
It was addressed to a person I haven't thought of for
years, but once was attracted to. "Could it be the
same person." She had a common last name. I moved
through an intermediate space without much to report
other than an unintelligible comment and a smile from
a woman in a passing car. Once past a house where
musician friends once lived, I realized the area was
quite a bore and decided to adopt the chance method by
getting on the next bus.

An atopos or 'useless area' became visible during
the bus ride. Located underneath a busy street's
bridge, just west of a giant bowling alley, this dirt
trail by the highway fence and bridge supports had an
allure. It could be seen only briefly from a short
stretch of road or two in the vicinity, and only
viewed completely by access from the bowling alley
parking garage. Just today as i write this I saw
people moving through and standing in the area. A
short while later I got off the bus to see graffiti,
'paulrus is dead' which appears in multiple locations.
There was a hearing aid shop in a small building near
some apartment towers. On the hearing aid shop's
outside wall were the words 'building' in black
letters. It looked like another phrase before
'building'--some official title or designation-- had
fallen off or been removed from the brick. There were
marks visible where it had once been affixed.

Across the street a bright red, ornate church door
with gold decor and round black handles stood out. A
small courtyard just to the north had been designed
with maze-like patterns of grass and concrete. It was
too tidy and controlled, but was still a somewhat
welcoming area. A nearby dumpster had been decorated
with an ambiguous drawing and the words 'defend the
earth.' I recorded fingertip drumming on a large
aluminum soap container sitting there. To cool off I
headed for a usually interesting or charming thrift
store nearby. In the thrift store I conducted the
derive past clothes and various objects, and found a
unique candle of the cat-goddess Bast or Bastet, some
recording adapters, and a book about a town I grew up
near in a different part of the country. Inside this
book was an aerial picture of a mall (another mall!) I
used to visit as a child, but the photo was taken
before I was born. In addition to this, the
architect's name was the same common name of the woman
in the tropical plant invoice.

I'd intended to explore semi-deserted industrial
spots by the Willamette river, or a series of
overgrown alleyways in the northeast residential
areas, but I was tired and hot and decided to visit
them another time, perhaps with a camera. On my way
back to the busline which would return me to my bike I
saw a pine tree with a curiously bent limb much like a
single arm waiting to be sat on. If someone were to
sit there, it would appear that the tree was telling
stories while holding them up.

I enjoyed the feeling of my motions charting a kind
of geometry on parts of the city, though I was often
tempted to resist the basic instructions. It was a
humorous discipline to maintain the 'flight path.'
Making a sustained pattern across the social
landscape, across the habitual city space, for several
hours, left me with a mild urge to continue for the
rest of the night. The residue of derive lingered upon
me, creating new perception of the commonplace
movements.

M.K. Shibek
Portland Surrealist Group
8-06

THE FUTURE CITIZEN

The Future Citizen in a mock shooting gallery on a spending spree, laden with poisonous telecom and gaming devices strung about body armor woven into brain and spine. Microchip nano-factories deposit adrenalin at biometric checkpoint, seratonin captured in research labs fanned into abyss settlements quaking with sore dust. Body a sign under postmodern regime, sign in circulation to deny the depths, sway to magnet vortex illusion skeleton shape. Stolen body returns as cyborg advert super soldier, global positioning system constraint method. Restricted sponge soaks up the past, historical debris inflates; inverted world's black light hands; the social fate that breaks our knees.