Bulletin #2 "Since his death, Confucius has led a chequered career. Awarded the title of 'Duke' five centuries after his death, he lost it again a thousand years afterwards, only to be worshipped equally with Heaven four centuried later. After another century, he is being harshly criticized. No one knows what the future holds with regard to his reputation. True to his reputation for equanimity, he has not complained much about these reversals of fortune." (From DICTIONARY OF ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES by Stl Elmo Nauman, Jr. - Philosophical Library, 1978) THE SOLUBLE FISHERMAN; ( 11 November 1985) I admit my paranoia sometimes getrs the better of me. In connection with Tom Coffin, driving force behind THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, this has happened more than with most. Speaking of the sixties, he says, in Vol. 2, #4 of OPEN CITY; "I never felt personally that because we wore flowers in our lapels that meant we were the wave of the future." My first suspicion: This is a trap; he wants me to say: "What lapels?" How many even owned suits? And who doesn't wear flowers in lapels? And why does Tom Coffin, in everything he says or writes, always say something like that? And, yes, what lapels? # Jacques Baron on Andre Breton: "...this cold-blooded animal has never contributed anything but the rankest confusion to whatever he has been involved in." Andre Breton on the soldier as art critic: "...I cannot help but consider the constitution -- both of men and events -- of scientific socialism as a model school. As a school of an ever more profound understanding of human need which must aim, in all areas and on the largest possible scale, at finding satisfaction, but also as a school where each person must be free to express in any and every circumstance his way of seeing things, and must be ready to justify endlessly the non-domestication of his spirit." (Hear! Hear!) I found something at last in THE MANIFESTOES OF SURREALISM that I cannot disagree with -- except for some perhaps mischievously confusing rhetoric at the top of the second pate -- his address to Czhech Communists in 1936. On the whole it was a beautifully and untypically coherent statement -- with more than just the usual few brilliant quotable lines to recommend it, defining precisely his objections to Socialist Realism. The end for social organization to serve not, except incidentally, a means. Although there is a quote from Trotsky about winning bread and poetry. Thus Breton wound up much positioned as a physicist justifying pure research -- well and good as far as it went. Also by quoting authorities who denied, without evidence, that art is bourgeois propaganda, he weakened his argument. Art, as he points out elsewhere, is pressed into service of capitalist culture via co-optive methods (principally renumeration). It is a failure of socialism to wish upon it a similar role of servitude under socialist regimes -- resorting besides to even cruder methods. Liberating art from social co-option altogether makes sense in revolutionary terms. BREAD AND POETRY! -- Kerry Wendell Thornley 1986 KULTCHA c 1984 Kerry W. Thornley Available Exclusively From Illumi-Net Computer Bulletin Board System (404) 377-1141