More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies in outdated coats shout endless monologues of special offers and clog planes’ propellers with their own questionable meat.
Giants with cobwebs for faces, crab-headed generals encased in teeth. And so on. They wore armor and gold. They cast pestilential spells and yammered with abyssal gusto.
It hesitates, as manifs do before him. Thibaut surrenders his will and fires, Surrealist-style.
think someone invoked this deliberately.” “Who?” Thibaut said. “Why?” “The Nazis. Maybe they want devils that’ll follow orders better. I think they want their own manifs,” Virginie said. “I think they’re still trying.” They regarded each other. Pictured their enemies tugging at images from pages with whatever invocatory engines they could put together. “The Führer himself,” Virginie said heavily, “is an artist, after all.” Reproductions of his barely competent watercolors, his hesitant lines, his featureless faces, his vacuous, pretty, empty urban façades, had circulated as curios in occult
...more
Derainist
Celebes.
You’ve read the ‘Second Manifesto.’ ‘I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism.’ ”
Sam examines her camera. “Mostly what I want is the manifs,” she says. He thinks he sees distaste when she says that, alongside her eagerness. “I’m not leaving until I catch them all.”
The exquisite corpse leaps. For the moment of its jump everyone in the Paris street feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase. The world torques—
Toyen’s landscape,”
Main à plume.”
The manif exhales exhaust from its beard-train.
But play is insurrection in the rubble of objective chance. That was the aspiration, the wager of the Surrealists trapped in the southern house.
Around the world, the dreams and images, the work of all these women and men, the rage of Simone Yoyotte and the Martinican rebel students, the fury and delight of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, the fascinations of Georges He-nein, the red chaos of Artaud, the imaginings of Brauner, the constructs of Duchamp, of Carrington, of Renée Gauthier, of Laurence Iché, of Maar and Magritte, Étienne Léro, Miller and Oppenheim, Raoul Ubac and Alice Rahon, Richard Oelze and Léona Delacourt and Paul Nougé, Paalen, Tzara, Rius, of hundreds of women and men never heard of and never to be heard of but who were the
...more
ersatz coffee,
vivisectionists
recalcitrance
A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical. It unfolded.
That winnowing wind of Arnaud, of Lefebvre, Brassaï, Agar, Malkine, Aline Gagnaire and Desnos, Valentine Hugo,
Masson, Allan-Dastros, Itkine, Kiki, Rius and Boumeester and Breton and all of them in all the world and all that they had loved and all that they’d ever dreamed up. A fucking storm, a reconfiguring, a shock wave of mad love, a burning blast of unconscious.
Paris fell, or rose, or fell, or r...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
arrondissements.
quotidian
“You’re the Surrealist. You’re the one who taps objective chance.
sinews
Bad Marrow.
The manif ends another attack with a Surrealist assassination: the man at whom it stares sits suddenly down, undoes his buttons, looks into his body, now a cage filled with angry crows, and is still.
truculently,
Les Deux Magots.
brekerman
Alesch crucifix.
flexing his innards
What was the deal with the extra organs?
Caterpillar treads grind. The oilcloth falls shredded to unveil a tank. A Panzer III, stained by conflict, rolls forward on the concrete. From the front of the chassis, in front of the gun-turret, protrudes the torso and head of a giant. A man. Fall Rot. He is vast. He wears an outsized German helmet. His skin is cold white, his veins and muscles marked as if by wormtracks. He drips shadows from his eyes. His mouth is full of sharp teeth. He bunches immense arms. The demon is a centaur of tank and great man-shape. It is festooned with German flags.
manifophagic.
A radio, too, tuned to an afterlife channel? She reaches up and presses buttons on the Nazi engines.
The flat earth detonates. A convulsion. Thibaut is thrown back hard in a blaze of shattered stone. A bomb-blast. A raid from beneath. Thibaut glimpses fire and an explosion billowing up through the earth, an igniting plume, shoving into the tank-centaur, enveloping it in fire, flame that roars up, makes Fall Rot roar, too, in agony it doesn’t understand, goes up then stops, a frozen moment of conflagration. A still moment.
“I got through to them,” Sam whispers. Thibaut’s ears are ringing but he can hear her. “This little gate cracked open. I got it wider.” With the energies of sacrifice. With what she did to Alesch. “They had to come up for this. For that…thing.” She leans against a wall. Sparks burst from the machinery. A few researchers are still alive, are moving, crawling in the dust. “That,” Sam shouts at them, “was definitely against the fucking treaties.” “You said they…your bosses…couldn’t intervene,” Thibaut says. “Or wouldn’t.” “There was a block in place. You saw what the priests were doing until the
...more
unpersoned.
He hurls himself into the window of a cellar. As he falls, the glass heals behind him, brittle as sugar, as the Hitler-manif revises history, brings its vision to bear.
This is what the Führer’s self-portrait proclaims.
A giant’s pissoir: It was Paul Éluard, in 1933, in the collective discussion on the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, who suggested the transmogrification of the Arc de Triomphe into a urinal.
