Friday, January 22, 2010

DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK

Poet John Sinclair just shared details of a filmfestival scheduled in his home of Ann Arbor later this year, featuring a lecture that sounds like the perfect sand-wedge, between Bobby Campbell's fantastic artwork and recent mind-cleansing MCLUHAN/JOYCE postings:

Friday, March 26 at 5pm: ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL LECTURE -
at Ann Arbor Library, 343 South 5th Av, AA, MI 48104, 734-302-7774, free admission http://www.aafilmfest.org/

DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK - Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka's challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce's 1939 book/epic collage/meta-narrative film FINNEGANS WAKE (and Marshall McLuhan's Menippean Satirized translation of it) presaged experimental & political activist cinema. How did the WAKE influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage & Peter Greenaway? How & why does the WAKE tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? Why did Joyce hang out with Masons and reveal their secrets? Why did the British secret police study the WAKE? How did the WAKE invent MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program? How does the WAKE write a detailed history of the future? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-Blogosphere swirl (social networking), TMZ, Girl Talk and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep - dreaming awake. ReJoyce interconnecting Finneganese "funny funereels," "allnights newseryreel," "they leap looply, looply, as they link to light," "cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript," and "a ... riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed." Fun for all at Finnegans Wake. "Gerry Fialka's 'Dream Awake' is a great, entertaining, eye-opening, mind-widening, and provocative event. It amply demonstrated for me Marshall McLuhan's assertion that Finnegans Wake is 'a memory theater for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.' Highly recommended." - John Bishop, seminal James Joyce scholar, author of "The Book of the Dark," and author of the intro to the current in-print edition of Finnegans Wake.

3 comments:

Bogus Magus said...

Cor, that sounds great, sorry to be so many thousand miles away...

Bobby Campbell said...

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing, Fly! I know there are a thousand and one examples of Joyce (as/if) anticipating electronic social networks, etc, et al, but my two favorite examples are "HERE COMES EVERYBODY" & "HUSH! CAUTION! ECHOLAND!"

Steve Fly Agaric said...

Yes, I came up with HAIR COM(H)BES EVERYBODY - invoking BIGFOOT and the Giants?

Yes, I found the paragraph describing the film festival lecture a great piece of poetry. Wish I could be there, I hope it can be recorded and shared too.

NO worries Bogus, your right here now.

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