Born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine in 1891, Yvan Goll had one foot in the German avant-garde and the other in the French. Before World War I, when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the German Empire, Goll briefly participated in the expressionist movement in Berlin. At the outbreak of the war Goll moved to Switzerland to avoid being drafted and there befriended Hans Arp, Picabia and other exiled dadaists…
The Arras is a passage from Ann Radcliffe’s early Gothic novel ‘The Romance of the Forest’, first published in 1791. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) is ranked among the pioneers of the genre. In her novels Radcliffe developed the technique of the ‘explained supernatural’, which had a strong influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Marquis de Sade and Sir Walter Scott…
On Serge Gainsbourg‘s album Mauvaises Nouvelles Des Étoiles (Bad News From The Stars) from 1981 there is a song called Evguénie Sokolov. Although accompanying lyrics were printed on the sleeve, the song itself consists of nothing but farts, gurgling and rumbling accompanied by The Wailers from Jamaica. After all, the lyrics are a passage from Gainsbourg’s story of the same name, in which an artist suffering from incessant windiness is the protagonist…
Il sogno di una cosa was Pasolini’s first novel. He wrote it during the brief spell that he was active for the Friulian division of the Partito Comunista Italiano, which ended in 1949 when the party expelled him for “immoral behaviour”. But the text was not published until 1962 when Pasolini lived in Rome. At that time he had already made his name with the…
Black Dogs Circled is a collection of poems compiled by Mick Farren and Sea Urchin and printed in a limited edition. The 18 poems contain personal observations, phantasies, obsessions, memories and lyrics, composed by Farren with a musical ear and a sense of humour.