John Baker’s Blog

This piece by geoff on Metaxu Cafe, reports on the PEN World Voices Festival: The Secret Lives of Cities panel, which brought together authors whose work has focussed on a particular city: Juan de Recacoechea on La Paz, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed on Riyadh, Francisco Goldman on Guatemala City, and Joshua Furst on Minneapolis.
One of Goldman’s riffs [...]

Modernism was, of course, concerned with the modern world. But it made a necessary distinction between the modern and the Modernist. The modern was a matter of period and historical phase; the Modernist a matter of art and technique, a peculiar twist of vision.
Modernism brought together, married, dallied with, rejected and played out the interconnections [...]

SURREALISTS & SYMBOLISTS
The Surrealists stood against everything which mutilates man’s inner life, or stifles his imagination for the sake of peace and quiet, law and order and the smooth running of the social machine.
Surrealism constantly poses the question: Whether in the eyes of the society in which we live, the ‘compleat person’ is a ‘crime [...]

The Russian Futurist writer Mayakovsky wrote:
In order to write about the tenderness of love, take bus number 7 from Lubyansky Square to Nogin Square. The appalling jolting will serve to throw into relief for you, better than anything else, the charm of a life transformed.
Mechanization, the Futurists believed, shaped not only perception (as it did [...]