Maybe Number Thirteen

Latest edition of the Maybe Quarterly is now online...for the Solstice.

Things To Come

A Fairy Tale for Paranoids

The decision to start a Wiki for discussion of Illuminatus! seems popular with the gang, so we will probably start on that in the new year (Christian Calendar).

I have various bits and pieces that I found useful when doing the Illuminatus! course with RAW that I would simply like to put in one easily accessible place.

First of all, a list of characters, which had been compiled by Toff Philippo and shows just how many people swirl around in the books – and helps piece together who they all are (like a Russian novel, it seems easy to lose track). I tidied up the formatting, and Quackenbush posted it on the excellent RAWilsonFans website.


I hope we can supplement this list a bit with things like the origins of character’s names (someone called Mocenigo, for instance, betrayed Giordano Bruno to the Inquisition).

I also had a secret weapon during the course (for quick research of non-linear time plots) in that I found a (probably illegal) PDF download on a Russian site, in praise of the KLF. I actually found a couple of other places you could download or read online copies, but kept quite quiet about it for a while (not feeling secure about how an author might feel about PDF versions of a book).

Anyway – they exist, and you can find them if you have any skill at Googling at all…and who reads whole books on screen? Not many people, yet. As a research tool to supplement reading the paperback, it seems essential, however. Rather than point to my various secret sites, perhaps I should direct you to RAWilson Fans, again, as it would seem best if we all refer to the same copy (consistency of page numbering, etc). Here’s the ebooks page…whatever you do, don’t go to the html copy on that Buddhist hustler page… (heh)

NB: I do wish they would publish the thing in 3 volumes again, like my original set which I gave away. So much easier to carry around than the fat Omnibus edition. I’d also like to see the plot summaries (story so far) that appeared at the beginning of volumes two and three.

Somewhere in my boxes I have the programme for the stage show, which I should dig out…sadly, a few of the actors have left the planetary stage…and at least one is in jail (George Dorn).

While considering this project, I discovered that 3 issues of a comicbook version had come out. I have traced copies of the first two, but not the third (as yet).

Still, the artist, Mark P.Steele (ICARUS!) has a MySpace place where you can look at some of the art work.

Hot News

I just heard that the full version of the London Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson has gone online.

You can find it here.

Lots of stuff to enjoy. You may have watched excerpts here (Alan Moore, his exceptional second set), and elsewhere...but it's worth putting up with the sound quality (or is that just my PC?) [later: OK, it sounded fine on a Mac] to hear the astonishing Ken Campbell, hilarious Bill Drummond and two sets from Alan Moore, quite aside from the music and visuals, and Bob's wonderful words. Much hilaritas!

I only have one anecdote provoked by watching the whole thing (I missed the live moment). I saw the first show at the National, and I decided to take a friend to the shorter version they did in The Roundhouse. On the night I took my girl-friend of the time (who wasn't especially a fan of the material) an announcement was made that Prunella Gee was ill, and, at short notice, her part was going to be taken by Ken Campbell (!) I guess he remembers that night. She played (for instance) Mavis, so his opening routine was breaking George out of jail and giving him a blow-job (hidden only by a discretely placed prop plant...) It got even funnier, later.

A Wicked Wiki in the future

The Maybe Logic Academy ran for three years with Robert Anton Wilson (the founder) at the helm (what’s with all these shipping metaphors that keep slipping into this blog?) I guess I like the Great Pirates model, with a cybernaut steering the vessel. (and who the hell 'is' Flemming Funch?)

Since RAW left the planet, oh the best part of a year ago, the Academy continues to function OK. The current incarnation of the forum seems a bit clunky, to me, compared with some of the previous ones we had (sorry, Admin!) but it is also more complicated (which could explain that). Rather than a separate forum for each course, the campus now includes meeting rooms, blogs, general and course forums, etc. Oh, and guests and visitors also have access, rather than just an elite of paying students, which has led to spam attacks and other such nonsense. Still, generally, it’s great to have new minds joining us.

Work & Play together

The long-term students (lifers) still work together, occasionally meet up, encourage each other, work collaboratively and so on. You might see this blog as the kind of thing that emerges from such teamwork with friends who have never met in the body.

Anyway. We have been learning Wiki by doing some collaborative fiction writing using the Wiki set up – and now I have a rough idea how it works, I would like to start working on a Wiki based around Illuminatus!

Although that book dates back to the early 1970s, it doesn’t seem to date. A bit like Bill Hicks’ routines.

Working in the early 90s he was talking about the folly of a President called George Bush, and the stupidity of a war in Iraq. He dies, finds some posthumous fame, and people play the routines back 15 years later and, guess what, the references to George Bush and Iraq sound topical. Quite eerie, really.

I find The Illuminatus Trilogy doesn’t seem to date, either.

• Firstly, it has a plot that sprawls all over spacetime, so it doesn’t appear stuck in the 70s.


• Secondly, things didn’t change much, although people have become far more aware and knowing about conspiracies, Government corruption, magick, alternative history, drugs, and many of the other themes it contains (ecology, sexism, sizeism, etc.)


• Thirdly, it has some real premonition hits (like blowing a hole in the Pentagon which lets out the demon – something that might have seemed improbable/impossible before 9:11)


• Fourthly, it is far more readable than (say) Foucault’s Pendulum, which covers much of the same material, and yet far less trivial than (say) The Da Vinci Code.


• Fifthly, the authors deliberately layered up references and teasers so that it deserves (and rewards) re-reading.

My model for a Wiki arises from similar spaces I have found online like the one for Gravity’s Rainbow, or concordances for Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. Illuminatus seems far more accessible (if at times confusing to straight minds) than any of those.

We had a lot of fun teasing out some of the material when we did a twelve week course with RAW about just that one book. I really enjoyed the chance to talk with an author about a one of my favourite books, and with people who felt the same enthusiasm as I did. We can't have the input of either him or Bob Shea any more, sadly, but the book remains to work with.

Anyway – no doubt, as busy people you can’t spend all day reading a blog. If you like the idea, have any knowledge of the legal implications for copyright, etc, any experience in setting up or contributing to a literary Wiki, or any other comments, please do use the Comments function below.

Thank-you for your attention.

Just a hint of a breeze

It does sound as though we might get Issue #13 of the Maybe Quarterly pumped up one more time!

A glimpse at Bobby's student notes, from Douglas Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion course which Bobby may well (knowing him) work up into a finished piece for MQ, might give you a glimpse of the kind of thing to expect from studying around here, with all us school-haters (oh, perhaps I shouldn't generalize from my own experience of indoctrination by The State).

Me, personally, I just finished writing a 50,000 word novel called Foolproof, on the NaNoWriMo challenge, so I apologise for slightly neglecting this blog. I have no idea how pleased I may feel with it, as I didn't re-read, just kept going, like running a marathon.

I hope to offer a shorter piece (I know you're all busy people) for MQ, and even talk the magnificent Bobby into giving you a few pictures to look at, while you read.

More soon. Gotta go celebrate my marathon...

Ilustration is Bobby's Fool, from the so far incomplete RAW Tarot project...








If you want to see what cards we have so far you could:

• go to the Imperfect Index of our stuff (yeah, it has black holes where information should 'be') and scroll down to RAW Tarot.
• Search the whole blog for "Tarot" with the Search at top left of screen
• Use the Tarot Label at the bottom of the post, to look for related posts

Doldrums

Ah, the wind went out of our sails, and here we find ourselves drifting.

For any regular readers (if such exist) this blog hasn't become totally abandoned, like the Mary Celeste (or the Marie Celeste, if you prefer Conan Doyle's fictional version), but our speed has definitely reduced quite considerably.

I have taken on the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing a 50,000 word book in the month of November, which steals a lot of my writing time, and Bobby has been producing an updated version of his Okey-Dokey sequence, which will finally appear in five volumes.

We haven't had any offers from new contributors to liven this whole thing up, and with a few courses running even the general forum is quite sluggish right now, with people's attention on their course work.

But don't give up on us.

We still plan a new Maybe Quarterly #13, due out on the Winter Solstice.

Be Seeing You!

James Joyce

Bucky Fuller

One Thing After Another

9 Haha 135 de l'Ere Pataphysique
Boomtime, 68th of Bureaucracy, YOLD 3173
I realised the other day (when a new MLA student asked who or what did RAW refer to) that we have a new world ahead of us. Our founder, teacher, friend and collaborator moved on, and left us the Academy as one of his legacies (along with some 35 books). It now has a life of its own.

This blog started as a student ezine, and has slowly ended up more-or-less written by me (for the time being). As I have my own particular quirks, it no longer represents a real cross-section of the student body's interests, merely my take on everything. I try to remain focused on MLA stuff (I have other blogs for other interests) but for a better sample you might want to visit the open part of the campus(in spite of a recent invasion of pseudo-visitors - a horrible viral marketing ploy by Ask.com. Oh, don't ask! No really. Don't, it only encourages them.)

Still, you could always search the archives through the link on the right, or the Index, if so inclined.

Time On Your Hands

I don't know how the future of Blogger works out, but I guess this will remain as some sort of record of the times. I continue to add links (that may well reflect my own obsessions) because I find it useful (and I hope you may, too) to have one reference point to keep some favourite places to wander and wonder, when you have some time on your hands.

The weird calendars (by the way) come from Bob's interest in such human constructs and grids. And when I say 'Bob' (around here) I refer to Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) of course. Elsewhere, I might mean Dylan, or Bob Dobbs...

"God spelled backwards is Dog, but Bob spelled backwards is still Bob".

I wish I had a palindromic name!

That's as maybe...

A new set of courses has started, and a whole new bunch of people arrived - mingling in the general forum, but coming for Erik Davis's course on The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K Dick (why oh why didn't I join that one!) and Douglas Rushkoff's course - TECHNOLOGIES OF PERSUASION: From Propaganda to Paranoia - which started today. (Well, OK, yesterday by 5 minutes in the UK time zone, but San Francisco has 5 p.m, and New York 8 p.m. on October 1st, so I feel partly correct!) You can find an interview with Rushkoff in the Info-Cache blog here (or see link in the right hand column).

It feels terrific to have an infusion of fresh minds arriving through different channels, and the 'old crew' seem revitalized themselves, producing a really exciting new edition of the Quarterly.

Go to DeepLeaf Productions (permanent link on the right) for details of future courses, like Antero Alli's much anticipated Astrologik: Astrology Without Tears, starting 29 October.

Starhawk and Phil Farber have courses scheduled for November...so on we go...

And How Are You Tonight, Mr Wilson?

Cult author Alan Moore pays tribute to Robert Anton Wilson at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London March 2007.



Definitely worth five minutes of your time, if you loved Bob...and his works.

New Issue of MQ now out

The twelfth edition of Maybe Quarterly has emerged in time for the Equinox (or you can use permanent link at top right).

The front page of MQ also includes links to all Back Issues.

Amongst many other other things, it contains the collaborative writing piece I previously mentioned (a group writing experiment using a Wiki). What you see only counts as a sample, and we may issue more at some point (it already grew quite a lot larger).

You will also find a far wider ranging group of contributors, and a real breadth and variety of contributions.

Enjoy!

Health Issues

Boomtime, 23rd of Bureaucracy, YOLD 3173

MLA field agent, Ko, has just posted a great set of links and info after hir visit to the 2007 conference of the Centre for Orgonomic Research and Education (on Reichian subjects)...which you can read and refer to in the public part of the general forum, here. If the link don't work, the vandals took the handles...you can always find it in General Discussion under Orgonomania Revisited...

And speaking of health:

I hear that Kent (the founding editor for MQ) has had an extremely stressful and unpleasant time with the state of his health, recently - but still shares the planet with us, and will be back at his desk ASAP. I feel sure that all the old-timers of the MLA send him their best wishes...

You can find a link to The Kentroversy Pages on our list of members' blogs.

Peace.

Visit the Remains and Help Yourself to the Leftovers

[text remains unfinalised]

For new visitors, from whichever direction you arrived, just a little explanation about how I see this 'place'. RAW's wonderful (if hardly unique) creation of an interactive online forum for learning brought together an interesting group of people, with some core members emerging, and a glittering cast of guest stars, walk-ons, extras (who we might call lurkers), has-beens, wannabes, provocateurs, people hidden behind make-up and/or masks and people who strip everything off and run naked through the marketplace.


And the Academy has many more resources than a mere forum - it has a rather fine library of RAW material and work from people that he liked, I'll offer a relevant sample:

The values that Taoism sees in woman and water are their harmony with the Tao. I have not translated this key term, and I do not intend to; but Ezra Pound's translation - "the process" - seems to me more adequate than "the Way," "the Path" and most of the other attempts. Students of General Semantics might understand if I say that the "Tao" comes very close to meaning what they mean when they say "the process-world." The Tao is the flux, the constant change, amid which we live and in the nature of which we partake; or it is the "law" of this change. (But, of course, the "law" and the "change" itself are not different in reality, only in our grammar and philosophy.) A Zen master asked how to get in harmony with the Tao, replied, "Walk on!" Water and woman represent adjustment to the Law of Change, which "man, proud man, dressed in his little brief authority," and his abstract dogmas, tries to resist.

Anna Livia Plurabelle, the water woman, represents the values of the Tao in Finnegans Wake . The very first word of the book, "riverrun" - not the river and the running of the river, but "riverrun" - places us firmly in the "process-world" of modern physics, which is the world of the Tao.

Joyce and Tao By Robert Anton Wilson
From The James Joyce Review, vol. 3, 1959, pp. 8-16

Because of the ephemeral nature of a forum (a rather linear kind of transaction) we planned a quarterly magazine to capture 'the good bits'. Not only did that (through a McLuhan lens) appear based on an old-fashioned print cuture, but it seemed sluggish and unresponsive in a hi-speed modern environment - and, inevitably (or at least predictably) a few enthusiasts provided nearly all of the content, and when they lapsed the editor had to write most of it, and then the group complained it had become unrepresentative.

A few of us decided to start this blog as a more flexible alternative - hovering between chat and finished pieces. Here and Now we find ourselves on a 200th post, and a similar monoculture has appeared in terms of linear contributions by an ever-diminishing group of contributors. Perhaps just following a natural life-cycle?

I would feel disappointed if people only came to see 'the latest post' and not do a bit of detective work, rummage in the archives, ask about the odd items in the apothecary jars, or the strange preserves in the old-style delicatessen section, or visit the back rooms (access via Vico's Bar).

I have started indexing, labelling and linking precisely to encourage exploration - just as RAW encouraged us to do a little archaeology (or mining) of the Twentieth Century - combined with early-uptake and adventurous responses (brain machines, online forums, Futurist approaches to the Singularity, etc).

I think of this site more as a process that a publication. I feel free to return to, and edit, posts. After all, you don't want to find dead links, do you? Why would you want to lock down the words and images? OK, you might like to see the Director's Cut, or sample the raw source material (the first take, or even outtakes) but it seems obvious to me that we should allow ourselves the freedom to tweak, sample, cut-up, hide, reveal and edit the material. Not all contributors have Admin rights (but they could), and any contributor could start a peripheral blog and link back here (and many of us have, as you will find in the links on the right).

If I appear to state the obvious you have to understand that I recently visited another forum and got severely told off for going back and editing or deleting posts of my own. Apparently it made communication difficult for them, and more particularly could get used to make others appear stupid or incoherent, or myself look clever. Apparently, once something gets said (written) in their world, it goes into the electronic akashic records and you have to live with the karma of your own stupidity (or something). I find that impossibly conservative and restrictive! So, I can't correct typos, factual errors or uninformed (or badly phrased) opinions - nothing ever gets forgiven and forgotten! Ludicrous! The Wayback machine and cached Google pages suffice for me, and if people quote the parts of my posts to which they are responding, where can confusion arise? Unless I deny I ever said such a thing!

As a lover of Burroughs, Cage and other anarchists and process-based types, I couldn't believe how oppressive that felt (not to mention the flaming). After all, you can only mess with your own contributions to a dialogue, and further feedback from others remains possible. Of course, if you acquire admin rights (so you can interfere with other people's material) then you do incur some responsibilities, too - and need to act with good intent.

However, you can always sample the source and re-mix. I liked John Cage's distinction between communication (with intent to affect the other) and conversation (idling along together in parallel).

Whether this blog can remain a process, and can resist turning into an object, remains to be seen. I like the idea that we continue to develop what Bob initiated, and these recent posts simply form my attempt to devise some Brief MLA courses, in the tradition of self-directed learning.

Meanwhile, I will work on making the blog denser, but not longer - feel free to do what you want with it. You can always check out further opinions of mine on my own blog. Be Seeing You!

NB: the next Maybe Quarterly falls due on the Autumnal Equinox, 23 September 2007 - that leaves you a month to consider making a contribution.

Paris by Night

We seem to have Paris in our sights for next year's MLA European get-together (Bogus View - Borksy View - of MLA Meetup 2007).

Borsky has started on our trip to the Underworld; I would insist on dropping in on Shakespeare and Co.
George Whitman is the legendary owner of Shakespeare and Company. He originally comes from Salem, Massachusetts, but for the last sixty years has made Paris his home. George is a bibliophile of such stature that he insists his guests read a book a day and believes himself to be living in a novel. At 91 years old, he has recently retired but still sits as a figurehead above his store.

The Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart a piece by George...

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is "Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise". I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world.

NB: He allows young travellers to stay in the residential quarters of his rue de la Bucherie premises, in exchange for two hours' work in the bookshop each day; you are also encouraged to read a book a day during your stay...
Virtual Tour of Shakespeare and Co.

I'd love to bring Brassaï to people's attention (try Google Images) but only because of my early love affair with Henry Miller's writing (before sombunall of the feminists labelled him some kind of chauvinist - but ask Anaïs Nin before you judge him too harshly, and anyway the guy seems more like a mystic than a flâneur to me - and while on the subject of the French (and Duchamp, etc) I'd like to point you to Man Ray for sure, and Lee Miller, and all sorts of other wonderful people (I'll get back here with links and images when the whisky (for the flu) wears off.

Let's see - Louis Aragon (Paris Peasant), Louis Malle, Burroughs and Gysin at 9 Rue Git le Coeur (the famous "Beat Hotel") , Queneau, Prévert, Les Enfants du Paradis, oh, I'd better just go sober up and start again, seeing as how Paris in the 30s and 40s seemed like London in The Sixties...Picasso and Dali came up from Spain, people hung out, what can I say?

Maybe we can meet up there next year, but meanwhile...

...anyone got any clue as to the most creative city to live in right now?

Happy New Ears!

When RAW died at the age of 74, it seemed to me that I found myself next in line (at the age of 61). The Forum and the Academy seemed generally a space for younger folk. Not that I thought it made me any wiser (or put me at the front of the line for dying!) but it does (inevitably) make my frame of reference different, just because of having started earlier in the Twentieth Century.

Now that I (along with an unknown group of others)have begun working on the self-directed course of The Tale of The Tribe (which doesn't have a discussion zone) I seem to have leaked a lot of my 'thinking aloud' to this blog...and with Comments we can at least have brief exchanges, as we would in the forum.

The monologue aspect of a blog post suits me, too (no interruptions and sidetracks - heh heh).

One of the reasons I started talking about Duchamp and Cage, etc, arises from wanting to create a context. It seems so easy to think of creative people working in isolation.

Even now, I get a little shock when (say) Bob Dylan mentions Neil Young, in Highlands as though I somehow assumed he doesn't live in the same soundscape world as me...or might have read the same books, seen the same films, etc.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone's always yelling turn it down

So, to put Joyce and Pound and Korzybski and Fuller in context (when what they worked on still really was 'modern' - as in contemporary) I have studied around them, I want to know if they knew (or knew of) each other...and find it amusing that Joseph Campbell ended up the way he was because of total poverty in The Thirties (and just giving up and retreating into books) - so I also find it intriguing that Cage (from sheer poverty) started playing Furniture Music (finding sounds in all the objects around him) - and then got into electronics and experimental music (early uptaker in The Forties) and began the 'Happenings' in The Fifties that mosbunall people associate with The Sixties (if they don't think of Cabaret Voltaire in The Twenties). And yes, I have deliberately used those decades (inaccurate though I find them) to show how we cut up a century. We even believe something 'new' happened in 2000, but many people in 1900 felt the same...they felt really trendy and new...

Anyway - I am working my way around John Cage again. I have access to a couple of his books through the library - Silence, and For The Birds ("I am for the birds, not the cages that people put them in"). The library also has various pieces of his 'music', but I feel more interested in his cross-over work. I really enjoyed Roaratorio (a soundscape - or Irish Circus -he made for Finnegans Wake) and just got a copy of his highly amusing 'radio play' Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet.

I already have, in my collection, the rather wonderful Indeterminacy, a series of 90 one minute stories he tells on one channel, while David Tudor adds random sounds on the other stereo channel.

Plenty of mushroom stories for our Phly. You can find the stories online here...and while reading them on screen just listen to the sounds of the environment you find yourself sitting in (it'll do just as well, and I feel sure he would approve).

I feel like I want to make a timeline, and put all these people onto it - maybe focused on 1932 (when Bob arrived on the planet, and Cage arrived back from a trip to Europe, aged 20, to study with Schoenberg), from William Burroughs (studying with Korzybski) to Joyce refusing psychoanalysis from Jung, from Joe Campbell in his cabin, to Crowley on his island...to Hitler and Korzybski and Wilhelm Reich, and on and on and so on.

Ahem. You can see what I mean about my tendency to monologue (or even, to get Shakespearean, soliloquy). Musing. Brooding. Thinking. Meditating.

Strictly speaking, I feel I should take all this over to my own blog, but so long as it seems fairly relevant I will stay and clutter up the blog. OMMMM. AUMMMM.

Okey Dokey

Regular readers of this blog (if such exist) will know sombunall of the work of Bobby Campbell...and if you don't then you can use the Imperfect Index (search for Bobby's Art) to sample his prolific contribution to both this blog and the MQ magazine. I may leave it to him to explain in detail, but he has put a re-vamped edition of Okey-Dokey #1 up online here (and you can also order a hard copy, using PayPal - for a price that hardly covers mailing costs, I would think).

NB: I created the Index before Blogger introduced Labels (which posters can add for themselves), so although I will attempt to update the site using the labels so you can filter by subject, you'll miss out on the tantalising titles to posts, when I simply cluster all posts by, or about, Bobby's work (say) - in the Index you can browse all the intriguing titles...

Don't forget that you can Search the blog, using keywords, with Blogger's own searcher (top left hand corner of screen). Putting 'Okey' into that will take you to an Okey-Dokey prelude from June 2005, and a Work-in-Progress version from April 2006.

For any MLA members who wonder why I went so quiet on the Forums - I figured I could usefully go back and re-read some of this wonderful extra-curricula stuff that we 'student/participants' generated (apart from reviewing all the course material), and indexing and labelling and hyperlinking it gives me the excuse and motivation to go look at it all again. I'd think of it as a real shame if it just faded into Web ephemera, for lack of a hard copy archived in a library, somewhere.

The Trip (a trap)

I have no idea how many visitors we get ("LOOK OUT! Mind that thing on the floor!") and/or how many return, and/or how many simply pass through. This blog doesn’t represent the Admin side of the Maybe Logic Academy but belongs to a bunch of ‘students’ who like to spread the word of a fun place to hang out, and share their (sometimes) obscure and esoteric interests.

As you can see from this post last October, among the people who ‘study’ at MLA you will find all sorts of creatives (writers, musicians, artists, etc) as well as philosophical folk, people into magick, or gardening, or Reichian work, etc.

As the Maybe Logic Academy originally started so that people could attend seminars and courses with Robert Anton Wilson without him (or them) having to travel around the world, that original flavour pervades throughout – but new tutors have come on board, and RAW has left the planet, so changes seem inevitable.

The MLA quarterly magazine may give a more balanced view of the range of our group interests, but this blog reflects a rather narrow cross-section of the student body…and in particular my own little reality-tunnel containing Zenarchy, Duchamp and conjuring, etc, which may display my ageing brainmind, and might well leave the other contributors quite cold.

To misquote the Principia:

"Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Herman Hesse. Only a handful understood Albert Einstein. And nobody understood Marcel Duchamp."

[side trip]
With apologies to Emperor Norton - and if you haven’t heard of him, or The Discordians, try this site.

Here’s someone following the trail

I first heard of him [Emperor Norton] from reading the Principia Discordia, written by the Joshua Norton Cabal of the Discordian Society. Their motto is: "Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Herman Hesse. Only a handful understood Albert Einstein. And nobody understood Emperor Norton." The Discordian Society is sometimes called "nonsense disguised as religion or vice versa."
[ahem]

About Marcel Duchamp:
from A CRITICAL HISTORY OF 20TH-CENTURY ART
by Donald Kuspit
Chapter 2, Part 3 Spiritualism and Nihilism: The Second Decade

In 1917 he made Fountain, a urinal purchased from "Mott Works," a New York plumbing company, and signed "R. Mutt" (not only an ironical misspelling, suggesting that the artist is a mongrel dog or stupid person, but, as has also been thought, a play on the German word "Armut," meaning poverty). That same year he made Trébuchet (Trap), in chess a term for a pawn placed to 'trip' an opponent's piece. (Duchamp supposedly retired from art making in 1923 to devote himself entirely to chess, becoming a champion.) The work was a coat hanger which Duchamp nailed to the floor of his New York studio, where visitors could trip over it.

Actually, and more interestingly to Lasagna flingers, 'Trebuchet' can also describe one of those medaeval catapults...whether we should consider this piece of 'art' as the equivalent to a rotting cow thrown over the battlements of the art establishment, I don't know (but I am not the only one to notice the ambiguity/pun):

Duchamp had constructed other ready mades before Fountain. Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack, and Comb, for example. The title of each piece is the name of the object. He seems to diverge from this pattern with Trebuchet, which is generally translated as trap, but is also the name of a medieval catapult. Trebuchet is a coat rack affixed to the floor. Were you to trap your foot in one of the hangers, you would no doubt catapult yourself into a wall.
SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS 17TH ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIBERAL ARTS AND THE EDUCATION OF ARTISTS. THE EDUCATED ARTIST
PROCEEDINGS 2003 CONTENTS PAGE 10
KEYNOTE ADDRESS by David Rhodes "Educating Artists"

However, my interest in Duchamp does not arise from his Trickster/prankster aspect (amusing though I find it) but from the fact that he escapes easy labelling as an 'artist'. He seems well informed on the science of the day, and in fact invented several items which you could see as contributions to the sciences of the day:

But Duchamp, as a disciple of Henri Poincaré, also understood the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry and higher dimensionality in a far more serious and technical way than any other artist of his time. He maintained a passionate interest in science throughout his life, and he made several innovations, in optics, mathematics and perception, that we have not understood both because Duchamp himself chose to be maddeningly cryptic about his intentions and achievements, and because we have not been open to the possibility that an acknowledged genius, once categorized as an "artist," could also be innovative in science.
from OF TWO MINDS AND ONE NATURE
by Rhonda Roland Shearer & Stephen Jay Gould

The reference to Poincaré seems appropriate, as he often gets described as a polymath and the last universalist of mathematics (before the field became so immense that no one brain could grasp it all) - and I think of Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) as a polymath (of a different kind). With reference to Duchamp's 'art' I find it interesting that among Poincaré's many interests we find chaos theory, dynamic systems, the theory of relativity, quantum theory and (especially) Topology.

Like Joyce, Duchamp seems to have built in quite a few jokes and timebombs for future critics to puzzle over, or discover belatedly.
An Artist's Timely Riddles
Deploying scientific methods to understand a Dada artist's provocative creations
Ivars Peterson



Marcel Duchamp site
Understanding Marcel Duchamp Truly excellent animated timeline of Duchamp's work
tout-fait (online magazine of Duchamp studies)
Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage a piece from tout-fait
Art Science Research Laboratory (Includes animations of the Rotoreliefs, etc)
Duchamp plus music
Anémic Cinéma film by Duchamp

RAW renewed our interest in the 'Moderns', even though they worked many decades ago, now (and Duchamp didn't come up in conversation) - in particular Joyce and Pound - but (enjoying my ear) I also like the work of John Cage - and he seemed particularly inspired by Duchamp's use of chance in creativity - something also explored by William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson (amongst others). I don't think all these ideas have become dated, yet, or explorations completed! I find particularly intriguing the cross-over inspirations and collaborative work, like Cage's "Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake" (1979), and Somewhere between Dream and Reality: Shigeko Kubota’s Reunion with Duchamp and Cage - a wired-up chess set changed the sound scape of the space depending on the moves made by the chess pieces.

"In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions."
John Cage.

"At a Dada exhibition in Dusseldorf, I was impressed that though Schwitters and Picabia and the others had all become artists with the passing of time, Duchamp's work remained unacceptable as art."
John Cage, Interview, 1973

The Original Trap "A real coat hanger that I wanted sometime to put on the wall and hang my things on but I never did come to that - so it was on the floor and I would kick it every minute, every time I went out - I got crazy about it and I said the Hell with it, if it wants to stay there and bore me, I'll nail it down… and then the association with the Readymade came and it was that" - Marchand du Sel
Some Other Readymades.

NB: I'd feel stupid discussing 'moderns' from 70 odd years ago, if they hadn't drawn on so-called '19th Century work' like Etienne-Jules Marey, Étude chromo photographique de la locomotion humaine, 1886
I got these simply from development pages of Understanding Duchamp - a true work of love...from Andrew Stafford...although most of us may feel more familiar with the work of Muybridge.


Just found this site - it looks useful: An Encounter with Marcel Duchamp