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"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."--The Posthuman Dada Guide ? The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse--a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution--lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada--and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources."… (more)
User reviews
The Esteemed Poet eee kUMMINGs famously said that there WAS some shit he Would not eat. Knowing the context that primed the quote's power, nonetheless upon hearing it I asked myself: So there is a lot of shit that he will eat, or would have, or
I am against eating shit, and have never eaten shit. I have spent a lifetime watching my fellow Americans eating shit. I am accustomed to the sight. But I won't eat it, because I am not accustomed to eating it, only to watching my fellow Americans eating shit. So I did not eat Andrei Codrescu's The Posthuman Dada Guide, Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, a book that is shit. Eek, cries kUMMINGs, I would not have eaten that.
So I had to take a novel approach to the book and read it.
Reading shit is not at all like clearing a path in a virgin, going at a jungle with a machete, but that means nothing, for neither have previously been done. Books that are shit intentionally attract flies, some of them huge. The flies spread filth and disease—the resultant maggots when found are never identified.
For example, when Codrescu writes
folklore They about misunderstanding hilarious reapeating geography Don but
come forcefully old Petrograd reactionary Myron S. Gluckman mission French writing
terror, were spiritual returned language independent born explain pastoralists
and I could go on.